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.

I emerged from the black oil pools in the forgotten house of dreams in the wild backcountry of the heart. I am heir to the sun, child of Mother Earth and the Mayan galaxy. All the mountain cures and healing waters and winds and junipers run deep in my bloodstream.

I sat back in my wooden chair as they signed the paperwork and stared down at the arm rests, studying the various layers of paint, the chips and cracks. How many hands had gripped them? I wondered. What lives were attached to those hands, what dreams were shattered, what sorrows were they trying to squeeze out of their souls?

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.

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

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.

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.