I culled poetry from odors, sounds, faces, and ordinary events occurring around me. Breezes bulged me as if I were cloth; sounds nicked their marks on my nerves; objects made impressions on my sight as if in clay. There, in the soft language, life centered and ground itself in me and I was flowing with the grain of the universe. Language placed my life experiences in a new context, freeing me for the moment to become with air as air, with clouds as clouds, from which new associations arose to engage me in present life in a more purposeful way.

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.

How much truth can we bear? Our tolerance for carrying the truth is not very high. I mean, the slightest discomfort about truth and we run to our refuge of our jobs and our schools and our friends who keep supporting our blindness.

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

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

I believe it's our responsibility as citizens to get in there and not accept the constant failure of prisons to deal with racism, lack of privilege, and impoverishment - not accept any of that. Just get in there!

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.