“I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music.”

Poetry is an extra hand. It can caress or tickle. It can clench and fight.

The man who believes in giraffes would swallow anything.

I want to speak, to sing to total strangers. It’s my way of talking to the world.

I don’t like writing essays or theory.

There have always been poets who performed.

Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.

Lovers lie around in itBroken glass is found in itGrassI like that stuff.

I use the language I use to my friends. They wouldn’t believe me if I used some high-flown literary language. I want them to believe me.

I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock’n roll.

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

Stadium rock and commercial rock are the opposite of what poetry needs. An audience of around 200 is ideal for poetry.

I would have walked on the waterBut I wasn’t fully insured.

And the BMA sent a writ my wayWith the very first leper I cured.

You take the human being and you twist it all about So scrub my skin with women Chain my tongue with whisky Stuff my nose with garlic Coat my eyes with butter Fill my ears with silver Stick my legs in plaster Tell me lies about Vietnam.

I was run over by the truth one day.Ever since the accident I’ve walked this way.

You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out.

It was stumbling on to really the bible of the blues, you know, and a very powerful drug to be introduced to us and I absorbed it totally, and it changed my complete outlook on music.

I play with the nativity and tell mary she looks good in that color blue.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

You are my blue crayon, the one I never have enough of, the one I use to color my sky.

When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water.

Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.

He’s my red adrenaline sky, but I just prayer he never paints me blue.

My sky is too blue for me to be scared of people painting it a little grey.