Cherish your wilderness.

To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane.

"We are, each of us, our own prisoner. We are locked up in our own story."

Everything pays for growing tame.

"With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world."