Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.

I don't like the idea of the black race being diluted out of existence. I like the idea of all of us being here.

beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.

at a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.

What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the '60s: Independent fire!

First fight. Then fiddle.