I write short stories, and I wrote a play.

Everybody who's anybody longs to be a tree.

If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.

We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there's a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.

What's a word, a talisman, to hold against the world?

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

Crassly put: When I write, I am trying not to bore myself and my readers.