Bedeviled, human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

When we think we have something to say we are usually wrong. We are fooling ourselves. Trip into discovery. Don't write what you know, discover something new.

Poetry is telling something to someone.

Without devotion any life becomes a stranger's story...told for the body to forget what it once loved.

Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless: I am living. I remember you.

A traitor commits his crime but once. The rest/is retribution.

Each of us suffers with envy/for the forgiven.

I am living. I remember you.

Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable... The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.