The essence in the night,
racing with the cold breeze.
Terrifies me how,
the acrid wind makes me wanna freeze.

But now as life changes, I realize
the temperature, is startin' to rise.
Always spitting venom at the enemy's words,
Being belligerent with every single verse.

The power of my words,
The lyrics with which I burn the night,
I feel the heat, maybe
the fire from the candlelight.

Basketball, it's just a game.
No, it's more than a game.
It's a passion.

The way your  possession impacts everything,
basketball is a life or death situation.
Basketball is like the military.
Trepidation in the eyes of the soldiers.

You work together with your comrades,
to battle the enemies.
Your comrade, he'll fall, and you are there
to lend a hand to him, being benign.

It doesn't matter what the outcome is,
as long as you fought hard and fought back.
You might have lost the battle, but in basketball,
you always win the war.

What lies ahead, I cannot see.
Where will I go? What will I be?
I don't know, I make my own path.
Life is an equation, life is like math.

What lies ahead, begins from the start.
No way to beguile, no graph, no chart.
No way to beat the clock of life,
don't try to end it with your father's knife!

The future is what happens when,
you believe in yourself, "I know I can!"
Fathom the concept, place it in your head.
Only you know, what lies ahead.

The lights shining bright on me.
The crowd anxiously watching.
I was 12, when I first performed.
My voice enchanting, piano keys strumming.
Music, how beautiful she is.
Fell in love with the way she talked to me.

All I can see, the future ahead of me.
The crowd is glaring at my presence
Music enlightens my life.
Music is like magic.
Sometimes joyful, sometimes tragic.

A Story
Li Young Lee

Sad is the man who is asked for a story
and can't come up with one.

His five-year-old son waits in his lap.
Not the same story, Baba. A new one.
The man rubs his chin, scratches his ear.

In a room full of books in a world
of stories, he can recall
not one, and soon, he thinks, the boy
will give up on his father.

Already the man lives far ahead, he sees
the day this boy will go. Don't go!
Hear the alligator story! The angel story once more!
You love the spider story. You laugh at the spider.
Let me tell it!

But the boy is packing his shirts,
he is looking for his keys. Are you a god,
the man screams, that I sit mute before you?
Am I a god that I should never disappoint?

But the boy is here. Please, Baba, a story?
It is an emotional rather than logical equation,
an earthly rather than heavenly one,
which posits that a boy's supplications
and a father's love add up to silence

This poem is explaining how the author's child demands a story from him, and how he cannot think of one. He visions the future when his child phases through adulthood to move on and leave him, and ironically, he wants to tell a story to his child.