I see many black males grasping for some thread of hope. There are so many destructive practices, glimpses into a psychic abyss. That must be very frightening.

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.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

Teenagers too often have to deal with loss and death. You had to cope with the untimely death of your brother; how can young people deal with such tragedies?

When I had my child, I planned on being with the woman I had him with for the rest of my life. If that doesn't work out, you have to see things from a different perspective.

The first of all qualities of a general is courage.

Asking what I considered an impossible salary when I didn't want to work for someone has boosted my pay again and again.

People don't like railroad tracks near them? We'll see how they feel when the percentage of U.S. citizens who can afford to drive a car goes way down, as it will.

I can choose to come into the world as my right brain personality, which is more compassionate, more open, more loving, and more right here, right now available.

I wanted to hit him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to shout myself into his ear.

We are all spirits. We get depressed. But music makes you want to live. I know my music has saved my life.

I'm a full disclosure kind of person.