And so I pray I am today as honest with myself, with life all around me and below and above me, with all who I encounter.

I can't stand the comfort zone. So many people I know, their parents give them their homes, and they get married and have children, or whatever. That's it. They don't ever go beyond that. That's not what life is.

We're all self-destructive when we're young. We all rebel. If we don't, there's something wrong. But when a Chicano kid's in a rebellious state, he has nowhere to go but to put himself in jeopardy with the police. When a kid who has some class privilege rebels, he's in a beautiful room and he can buy these horrible CDs and drugs. He's buffered from being a criminal.

I am learning to look at myself differently, to see the scattered remnants of hope and dreams and collect them again.

Understanding is the key to everything. To rage, fear, love. If you understand a situation, it's going to make you mad. Or it's going to make you feel fearful. If any of us even had a clue as to what Bush and those people were up to, we'd be running stark crazy mad out of fear.

Literacy is freedom, and everyone has something significant to say.

Every poem is an infant labored into birth and I am drenched with sweating effort, tired from the pain and hurt of being a man, in the poem I transform myself into a woman.