I close my eyes and can see men drawing lines in the dust. America pushes through the membrane of mist and smoke, and I'm a small boy again in Bogalusa.

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.

Life moves all too fast. When you feel weak, discouraged, depressed, or afraid, open the Book of Mormon and read.

[I]t's safer to be fond of dangerous people.

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.

You can have a poem like "B-Movie" and sum up thirty conversations that people have had on the subject, but I wrote it down, and other people didn't.

I'm not looking and I don't go hunting. I'm the type who's got to be found.

Pain is the doorway to wisdom and to truth.

I really didn't know a lot of rock 'n' roll until I moved to L.A. Before that, when I was in New York, I grew up listening mostly to R&B and soul and jazz.

No amount of talents, skills or charisma can sustain us the way integrity, character & attitude does.

There is no mundane dimension really, if you have the eyes to see it, it is all transcendental.

Even if you have constrained resources, don't cut corners. People will feel it.