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

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.

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.

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

My whole family are hams. They’re storytellers and everyone outdoes the next one.

One secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.

I’m not a religious person. I have a one-on-one relationship with God, but I don’t go to church like I should.

I was always the one asking everybody else if they were O.K. I never talked about my problems.

If I go gambling the slots, some of my friends will come with me and play along with me.

When a herd of cattle see a strange object, they are not satisfied till each one has sniffed it; and the horse is cured of his fright at the robe, or the meal-bag, or other object, as soon as he can be induced to smell it.

The city, a place to which one goes to do business, is a place where men overreach each other in the fight for money. But it is not a place in which one can live.

For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice – no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.