Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives.

Dare to love yourself as if you were a rainbow with gold at both ends.

In the days when hyenas of hate suckle the babes of men, and jackals of hypocrisy pimp their mothers’ broken hearts, may children not look to demons of ignorance for hope.

A world without poetry and art would be too much like one without birds or flowers: bearable but a lot less enjoyable.

Although himself frequently a target of guerrilla decontextualization, a major part of the meaning of Michael Jackson's life was to help balance the accumulation of horrors with something closer to love in its most empowering and healing sense.

The Emancipation Proclamation...can remind us in 2013 of all the mistakes we never want to commit again but it can also motivate us to fulfill to an ever greater degree the definitive freedom-sustaining and life-enhancing principles of democracy in living action.

I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant.