Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn't comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing.

My wife's dying upstairs and I can't do anything about it. I look in her face and I see the memories there. I see how I hurt her and how I said the wrong things and how I got angry and how I wasn't the man she hoped I'd be. I see that in her face and I see she's going to die with that. You think I'm not preoccupied?

It was as if pain were a room he had entered and the door had been locked behind him.

My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a sound. And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness that is much like the feel of a fish brushing against a hook.

These people you used to see every day, friends or acquaintances, after a while they become as distant as any stranger, people you suddenly recall late at night--you remember something they said or something silly that someone once did. For a few moments they completely occupy your mind; then you forget them again.

A poem is a window that hangs between two or more human beings who otherwise live in darkened rooms.

Adolescence is a dreadful period. We tend to notice those youngsters who misbehave and call attention to themselves, but there are others, equally miserable, who receive no help simply because they are silent. (41)