In a Throwback Thursday to top all Throwback Thursdays, Noisey got their hands on a bunch of previously unreleased handwritten poems by a 17-year-old Tupac Shakur. Courtesy of ‘Pac’s first manager, Leila Steinberg, the nine poems — titled “A Love Unspoken,” “Things That Make Hearts Break,” “Cupid’s Smile II,” “So I Say Goodbye,” “When I Do Kiss U,” “What I See,” “And Still I Love You,” “The Sun and the Moon” and “Untitled” — were written over a three-year period during the rapper’s adolescence. But more importantly, they provide an early glimpse at the artist that would become one of the most inspiring writers of his generation. R.I.P. 2Pac.

Read the poems below…

Check out an excerpt below of how Leila Steinberg first met 2Pac (read the full piece here):

When she became a young mother, Steinberg and her family relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area. Her husband was a DJ and nightclub promoter, and one night a 17-year-old Tupac came to dance at her husband’s club. That was the first moment Leila Steinberg saw Pac, and by cosmic design the pair ran into each other again the following day. “I was sitting on the grass in a big field in Marin City before starting to teach class,” remembers Steinberg. “I was reading Winnie Mandela’s Part of My Soul Went with Him, and Pac happened to walk by. He said, ‘What are you doing with that book? What do you know about Winnie Mandela?’ I said a lot, actually, that I was involved in the anti-apartheid movement. We began talking about issues that interested us, and he became a part of my family from that moment.

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