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

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

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.

I never thought I would type that I learned how to emote in poems from watching Star Trek but there it is.

Bones was a grouch but he was sympathetic. The show worked like a boy band in that way… it had characters who embodied different psychic or emotional positions and that allowed me to see a great range of things

That was one of things that surprised me so much when I was writing the poems.

I had to find a way to be more honest about what happened. And it wasn’t fun to write, even though the poems aren’t 100% autobiographical.

They are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home.

By that I mean, honest and not trying to amplify some mythological version of myself.

I mean getting people to think about what language actually means before they use it is a good thing.

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

I wanted to be like Kirk because he had magnetism and the ladies loved him.

But it’s become very clear the past nine years that some Americans truly resent thinking before they speak.

It will alter the way you hear poetry forever. And not in a good way.

The words that come direct from the people are the greatest.If you substitute one out of your own vocabulary, it disappears before your eyes.

The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.

No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.

One of the simple but genuine pleasures in life is getting up in the morning and hurrying to a mousetrap you set the night before.

Before you get married you should meet your fiance’s parents. It is not enough that you like his parole officer.

Long before many of us were even conscious of our own degradation, these men [Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. DuBois] fought for African national and racial equality.

If your husband wants to lick the beaters on the mixer, shut them off before you give them to him.

Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.