To be nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Nobody loses all the time.

Unbeing dead isn't being alive.

America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.

i remember we all cried like the Missouri when my Uncle Sol's coffin lurched because somebody pressed a button (and down went my uncle Sol and started a worm farm)

a poet is someone who is abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement. Which is to say the highest form of concentration possible: fascination; to report on the electrifying experience of being

(and from my thighs which shrug and pant a murdering rain leapingly reaches the upward singular deepest flower which she carries in a gesture of her hips)