I am this space my body believes in.

I knew life Began where I stood in the dark, Looking out into the light.

Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.

Tonight I feel the stars are out to use me for target practice.

I excavate history. I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them.

We have to embrace the good over the bad. That has to be one's personal project.

It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.

I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.

I think of language as our first music.

I said that love heals from inside.

I’ve been here before, dreaming myself backwards, among grappling hooks of light. True to the seasons, I’ve lived every word spoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?

Our kindness may be the most persuasive argument for that which we believe.

Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.

Hard to find a better drug than a song you love.

Many find their heart when they have lost their head.

Promiscuous ... was a word I had never applied to myself. Possibly no one ever does, for it is a sordid word, reducing many valuable moments to nothing more than doglike copulation.

I was taught a very strong work ethic that included punctuality, which I've always felt is a sign of respect for others.

I have had young fascinations but never love.

The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.

I had amnesia once or twice.

Death cannot kill that which does not die.