We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make. A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound, But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound, Totems of love and hate, black sorcery-stones.

Defeat is a fact and victory can be a fact. If the idea is good, it will survive defeat, it may even survive the victory.

Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you might die of the truth.

When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.

Since graveyards are often built over older burial grounds, I assume Dolores Park was probably an Indian, (an Ohlone) graveyard before that. I think the fact that it has so many layers underneath the contemporary one intrigues me.

I died in my boots like a pioneer With the whole wide sky above me.

If two New Hampshiremen aren't a match for the devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians.