When we're believing, we're not really thinking, because the belief has walls: "This is what I believe." So what I believe is like a box, and we're taking the energy of our thinking and putting into a box of beliefs, pretending that we're thinking. But we're really stifling our own energy. We create these mental stresses and frustrations, because we're blocking our spirit, so to speak.

They’re called poems but in reality they’re lines given to me to hang on to

Our bones, flesh and blood are made up of the metals, liquids and minerals of the earth and everything on this planet is made up of the same things. As humans we have being, so everything on the earth does too in our culture, because we are made of the same thing.

As human beings, we're given intelligence. This is how we make our way through this reality, how we manifest our reality clearly and coherently.

When I go around in America and I see the bulk of the white people, they do not feel oppressed; they feel powerless... and we understand the psychological genocide that they have already inflicted upon their own people.

In the society of illusion, reality must manifest itself. The story songs of Joel Rafael are that manifestation... the essence of minstrel.

I don't write as much now as I used to, but I write. The lines still come, maybe periodically, and I'll go through these little bursts of time where I write a lot of things then a long period of time where maybe I don't write anything. Or these lines will come into my head and I'll write 'em down in a little book, just little sets of lines, but I won't try to make stories or poems out of them. I'm doing a lot of that now, just the lines.