There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.

I arrived in San Francisco in January 1951. After the Second World War, the population was so uprooted. Soldiers came back home for brief periods and took off again. So the population was very fluid, and suddenly it was as if the continent tilted west. The whole population slid west. It took 10 years for America to coalesce into a new culture. And the new culture happened in San Francisco, not New York.

Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds... Poetry should transport the public/to higher places/than other wheels can carry it.

When I was a boy I was my father.

I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn, that Bridge was too much for me.

Our government is a bird with two right wings... They're devoted to the perpetuation & spread of corporate capitalism.

If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.