Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.

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 half-expect to check out, but I'm really there for it. It's not like at the dance, angry and forced. It's terrible in its gentleness and he's just wasting it on me.

A word of kindness is seldom spoken in vain while witty sayings are as easily lost as the pearls slipping from a broken string.

Science is a method of logical analysis of nature's operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature's forces, and their frequent predictability.

A true Zen saying: "Nothing is what I want.

Affirmative action was always racial justice on the cheap.

Her kung fu is that powerful.

I used to do drugs in high school. I've been living in L.A. for almost 10 years, and shortly after I arrived I cleaned up pretty much. Stuff goes on on the set, stuff goes on at parties.

Give according to your income lest God make your income according to your giving.

I've been reading an Alabama newspaper that one man shot another man because he beat him in a Bible-quoting competition.

Let me be clear: we are still a nation of immigrants, and we honor all those immigrants who are working hard to become new citizens.