Everything pays for growing tame.

The tougher the form the easier it is for me to handle the poem, because the form gives permission to be very gut honest about feelings.

My writing time needs to surround itself with empty stretches, or at least unpeopled ones, for the writing takes place in an area of suspension as in a hanging nest that is almost entirely encapsulated.

... people get confidential at midnight.

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.

Cherish your wilderness.

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