Prince Ea's spoken word poem "Don't Forgive Them," posted to his YouTube channel on September 30, 2026, opens with the most provocative instruction a piece on forgiveness could give: don't. Within the first ten seconds he tells the listener that resentment is a right, that the people who hurt you should not receive "the dignity of your forgiveness," and that you should "drink the poison of hatred." Then, at the 0:37 mark, with a simple "Wait a minute, you didn't hear me," the poem pivots and argues the opposite. Across roughly two minutes and forty-eight seconds, it redefines forgiveness as something you do for yourself, separates it from forgetting, trust, and excusing, names three people who need it most, and closes on a line about the past that is less a rebuke than a release. It is a compact piece of reverse psychology, and the structure is the most interesting thing about it.
The opening is not a straw man. It is a seductive, almost gleeful case for the grudge. "Get intoxicated with blame," the poet says. "Let it fester in your heart and run rampant through your veins." He anticipates the listener's objection, "Some may call you crazy," and answers it with the logic that most people carry privately: "if you hurt long enough, everybody knows they will feel your pain." Then he disarms the listener with a question that is hard to refuse: "don't act like this never been you."
The delivery matters here. The track drops in and out with music cues that chop the lines into short, percussive phrases, and the cadence leans toward hip-hop and street vernacular: "Yo, what's the phrase the kids say today? That's giving." This is a poet speaking in the voice of the wounded self, the part of us that wants the other person to suffer. By giving that voice its best argument, the poem earns the right to dismantle it later. A reader who has been told only that forgiveness is good will tune out. A reader who has just been coaxed into the grudge is primed to hear the correction.
Reverse psychology is an old rhetorical move, and poets use it because a prohibition is often more persuasive than an exhortation. "Don't" sounds like a dare. The listener who hears "don't forgive them" is forced to ask what forgiveness would actually cost them, and the poem makes that question the engine of the rest of the piece.
The first pivot is also a wordplay. "I want to go on record and say there's nothing more giving than forgiving," he says, and the rhyme does real work: giving and forgiving are the same gesture seen from two sides. Then comes the reframe that carries the whole poem: "It's not forgiving to the other, it's forgiving to yourself." The grudge, in other words, is the thing that holds you in place. The poem is betting that the listener will notice who is actually paying for the resentment.
The middle of the poem is its most vivid stretch of imagery, and it is worth reading slowly. Prince Ea sets forgiveness against a catalogue of comforts: "no therapist, no bath bomb, spa massage, yoga pose, or Planet Fitness" can heal you "more completely than the power of forgiveness," he says, and he invokes Oprah's book "Things I Know for Sure" to frame the claim as hard-won knowledge. The poem's register is comic, but the claim underneath is serious: that the most important repair is internal and moral, not a matter of treatment or self-care products.
The bodily metaphors carry the argument. Resentment becomes inflammation and "spiritual constipation." Forgiveness, then, is "prune juice for your soul." In his words, it's "tough going down, but it'll clean your system out and give you regulation." That is an honest image. Forgiveness is not pleasant to swallow, and the poem does not pretend otherwise. What it promises is cleansing, not comfort.
"Forgiveness is prune juice for your soul. It's tough going down, but it'll clean your system out and give you regulation."
(Prince Ea, "Don't Forgive Them," 2026, approx. 1:08)
The poem spends its most useful stretch, roughly from 1:22 to 1:43, correcting a misreading the commenters will supposedly bring. "A lot of y'all don't know what forgiveness is," he says, "so let me clear up all the nonsense." The clarifications are precise enough to be a short field guide:
- Forgiveness is not forgetting. The memory stays. What changes is its hold on you.
- Forgiveness is not a restoration of trust. You can release someone without handing them back the keys.
- Forgiveness is not something you do once. "The process is long and lonely," he says, and that honesty matters. Forgiveness is a practice that recurs.
- Forgiveness does not say what happened is okay. It is not an endorsement or an excuse.
The single most useful definition in the poem comes in the middle of that list: "It's a cleansing of your grudges, judgments, shoulds, and musts." The word "shoulds" is doing a lot here. Much of what we hold against people is not about what they did, but about what they were supposed to have done. The poem asks you to release the expectation along with the injury.
"Forgiveness does not say what happened is okay now. It says I refuse to let what happened control me."
(Prince Ea, "Don't Forgive Them," 2026, approx. 1:35)
That sentence is the thesis, and it is a quiet one. Control is the operative word. The forgiveness the poem describes does not change the past. It changes who holds the leash on the present.
The poem also refuses to offer a shortcut. "Forgiveness does not have a Black Friday sale," he says. "You must pay the full price." It is a joke with a sharp edge: the cheap version, forgiveness performed to look good or to end an argument, is not the real thing.
The poem names three people, and their order is deliberate. It moves outward from childhood to adult connection and ends inside the self.
First, your parents. The request is specific: forgive them "for not loving you the way you need it and not teaching you the lessons that they themselves didn't know." The poem does not ask you to pretend the love was adequate. It asks you to see that parents are also limited, often passing along lessons they never received.
Second, past relationships and ex-friendships. Here the poem borrows a line from a friend, "my homie Jay," who said "forgive them, they know not what they do." Prince Ea's gloss is the key: the point is to forgive "simply because 99% of people walk around asleep." That is a generous and slightly melancholy reading. The people who hurt you were mostly not operating with full awareness, and that is true of you too.
Third, yourself. This is "the hardest but most important to do," and the poem treats it as the destination the other two were pointing toward. "You could search the whole world and never find someone more deserving of forgiveness than you," he says. "So be kind to yourself." The closing request is "Forgive yourself for not knowing earlier what only time could teach you."
The last lines are the most musical in the piece, and they reward attention. "Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, I'm free at last." The phrasing borrows the cadence of a familiar liberation refrain, and it lands with the force of a declaration. Then the rhyme resolves the whole argument: "Because I have given up all hope for a better past."
That final line is easy to misread as resignation. It is better read as acceptance. The poem has spent two minutes arguing that you cannot forgive your way back into a different history. What you can do is stop asking the past to be otherwise, and stop charging yourself rent on it. The self-forgiveness the poem asks for includes forgiving yourself for not knowing sooner. Only time, it says, could teach some of what you now know.
The poem works best not as an instruction to follow but as a sequence to sit with. Three practical moves follow directly from its own logic:
- Name the grudge and ask what it is protecting. The poem's argument that resentment costs the holder more than the target is worth testing against your own experience.
- Separate forgiveness from trust. Ask which part of the situation you are releasing, the memory, the judgment, the "shoulds," or the expectation of repair.
- Work through the poem's three names in order. Parents, then past relationships, then yourself. Notice where the resistance is strongest. The poem suggests it will be at the end.
The video runs under three minutes, so the simplest next step is to watch it twice. On the first pass, listen to the opening case for resentment and notice how persuasive it sounds; on the second, mark the pivot at 0:37 and the list of what forgiveness is not. The poem's craft, including its rhymes ("giving" and "forgiving," "new" and "shoe," "last" and "past"), is tight enough to repay a slow reading. Then consider the poem's final argument: that forgiveness is less a verdict on the other person than a decision about where your own life is going. Prince Ea's piece makes that case in a voice that is playful, blunt, and, by its last line, quietly humbled.
