If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world.

These wrinkles are nothing These gray hairs are nothing, This stomach which sags with old food, these bruised and swollen ankles, my darkening brain, they are nothing. I am the same boy my mother used to kiss.

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.

It's very hard to write humor.

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.

But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.

The future is always beginning now.