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

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.

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.

There’s a lot to do when you’re a kid – spiders to catch, girls to poke in the eye – stuff to be getting on with.

It’s the rhythm that gets to the kids – they’re starved of music they can dance to, after all those years of crooners.

When your kids turn 13, an alien being invades their bodies and doesn’t leave until they’re 20.

In my first year at drama school, I did this kids’ show called ‘Let’s See.

Kids are more genuine. When they come up and want to talk to you, they don’t have an agenda. It’s more endearing and less piercing to your aura.

When I was a kid I used to hate getting picked for team sports. It would be the fit and sporty guys over there.

I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I just had a kind of energy, I was a fairly happy kid.

Kids are natural scientists.