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

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.

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.

The time to hesitate is through no time to wallowin the mire Try now we can only lose and our love become a funeral pyre

Which may indeed be said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times.

If religion becomes a cause of dislike, hatred and division it were better to be without it.

We are a people in more need of a little character than we are in need of an abundance of knowledge.

Do not become the candle that gives light to others but itself remains in darkness.

This is the way of the world I thought in my innocence, round and around the layers of peel until the taste becomes certain.

It was like she’d become the sun, and I started revolving around her. She was my center.

Don’t become me. Don’t let her down like I did. You only deserve what you make yourself worthy of. Do what I couldn’t. Be a man.