I ate mythology & dreamt'- Yusef Komunyakaa (Blackberries)

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.

‪You collide with destiny caught up in the mystery of walking the halls of a mind that's only inclined to recognize & expect victory.‬

Courage lays within easy reach of a child who knows nothing of how easily understanding can unravel, leaving a set of rules that apply to nothing, and an empty heart.

If the truth was equal to the lie, and our love was equal to our hatred, we would become absolutely nil persons.

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.

What do people want? Well, you really can’t talk about wants until you talk about needs.

When the soul is starved for nourishment, it lets us know with feelings of emptiness, anxiety, or yearning

Fools are wise until they speak.

I project a definite innocence. A lot of that is just the way I grew up.

If there were a truly existent I, It would make sense to be afraid of certain things; But, since there is no truly existent I, Who is there to be afraid?