“There is no way I would have written these poems had I not come back.”

I was always casting about for role models as a kid and the Star Trek was always available via reruns and also full of possibilities.

The day after the president Trump election, I remember feeling like it was 1984 again.

I learned a new language for it all in the 90s. Which in some ways isn’t bad.

The 1990s were also when a bunch of the soft-shoe language for race, gender, and class became paramount.

One of the hardest things for me to do is be fully open in a poem.

But fortunately there are also really excellent human beings all over the place, too. So it’s about perception and balance sometimes I think.

The contrasts between the haves and have-nots is so complicated.

I was fortunate enough to get a job at my alma mater, which brought me back to Indiana after being gone for twenty years.

One of the things I took from the show was emotional possibility.

I was a poor, geeky black kid in Indianapolis. There is nothing mythological about that.

You should check out William Shatner’s album The Transformed Man.

Because before that I wasn’t thinking about systems or food insecurity or whatever.

It was in the air somehow. That ownership of bigotry. I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid.

It’s financial of course, but it’s also the lifestyle choices. The more money people have the further away from each other they often want to be.

It made me want to change the kinds of poems I was writing, but I’m terrible at writing overtly political poems.

I wanted to be like Spock because he was unflappable.