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

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.

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?

Ah, Lord God be merciful to us all!

Character is simply habit long enough continued.

If it's me against 48 I feel sorry for the 48.

Today, we see ISIS dwindling. We see that terrorist organization, with all their bravado, losing their territory and going back from a proto-state to an underground terrorist organization.

To me, nature always appears more unbalanced than Gary Busey with a clogged Eustachian tube.

There is no happiness in the world equal to the happiness of being good.

This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.

No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies.

The path of duty lies in what is near, and men seek for it in what is remote; the work of duty lies in what is easy, and men seek for it in what is difficult.

Please everyone without becoming a hypocrite or a coward.