Thief!- how did you crawl into, crawl down alone into the death I wanted so badly and for so long.

There once was a miller with a daughter as lovely as a grape. He told the king that she could spin gold out of common straw. The king summoned the girl and locked her in a room full of straw and told her to spin it into gold or she would die like a criminal. Poor grape with no one to pick. Luscious and round and sleek. Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn. (Rumpelstiltskin)

Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.

Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.

I am teaching... This year it's kind of like having a love affair with a rhinoceros.

I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.

Now I am going back And I have ripped my hand From your hand as I said I would And I have made it this far.