We are, each of us, our own prisoner. We are locked up in our own story.

One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.

God serves the choosy. They know what to want.

To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.

When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, she is almost fifty years old

I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.

The time on either side of now stands fast.