One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.

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

Few people have written significant books about San Francisco. Robert Duncan was, in my opinion, often in the clouds. If he walked the streets a lot he didn't write about as such.

Most of the time I'm not really attracted to writing that's focused on filling and fighting it out within a well-defined container. I like work that gets out in the world and lets the world shape the poem.

Money is sullen And wisdom is sly, But youth is the pollen That blows through the sky And does not ask why.

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.

Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.