What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.

Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.

I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.

The end of a thing, is never the end, something is always being born like a year of a baby.

I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn't come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ahhh." That was the first poem.

In the bigger scheme of things the universe is not asking us to do something, the universe is asking us to be something. And that's a whole different thing.

Children when they ask you why your mama so funny say she is a poet she don't have no sense