Part of writing is discovering the rules of the game and then deciding whether to follow the rules or to break them. The great thing about the game of poetry is that it's always your turn - I guess that goes back to my being an only child. So once it's under way, there is a sense of flow.

life is a loaded gun that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem.

Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.

No one here likes a wet dog.

The really authentic thing about humor is that anyone can pretend to be serious. Anyone who's ever had a job - in fact, we're pretending to be serious now, more or less.

In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.