My heart is not peripheral to me.

Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying.

Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and occasions of love among and between peoples.

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

Anytime you see white men suppose to fight each other an you not white, well you know you got trouble, because they blah-blah loud about Democrat or Republican an they huffing an puff about democracy someplace else but relentless, see, the deal come down evil on somebody don have no shirt an tie, somebody don live in no whiteman house no whiteman country.

Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think