Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.

Vietnam helped me to look at the horror and terror in the hearts of people and realize how we can't aim guns and set booby traps for people we have never spoken a word to. That kind of impersonal violence mystifies me.

I’ve been here before, dreaming myself backwards, among grappling hooks of light. True to the seasons, I’ve lived every word spoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?

I think of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there's an ongoing evolution of clarity.

Blue is the insides of something mysterious and lonely. I'd look at fish and birds, thinking the sky and water colored them. The first abyss is blue. An artist must go beyond the mercy of satin or water-from a gutty hue to that which is close to royal purple. All seasons and blossoms inbetween. Lavender. Theatrical and outrageous electric. Almost gray. True and false blue. Water and oil. The gas jet breathing in oblivion. The unstruck match. The blue of absence. The blue of deep presence. The insides of something perfect.

It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.

I am this space my body believes in.