foster

Never go on a date unarmed._ Words of wisdom from my father. Well, my foster father. I was an orphan, of course. The best kings always are.

Actions speak louder than words, in fact. When we don't take action, we foster the mistaken reality of our old identity.

LOVE IS A FLOWERTreat your relationshipAs if you are growingThe most beautiful sacred flower.Keep watering it,Tend to the roots,And always make sureThe petals are full of colorAnd are never curling.Once you neglect your plant,It will die,As will your relationship.

Be like the sun who fell in love with the moon and shared all his light.

I used to belong to a family unit, with a foster mom and dad and my little sister, Bean, but that's over and I don't want to talk about what happened , or how unfair it was. Not yet. The less said about that the better, because if there's one thing I learned from Ryter it's that you can't always be looking backward or something will hit you from the front.

Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and say was characteristic of some leftist poets, Beat poets, street poets and populist poets of the 70s and 80s__ll of whom I basically view as comrades, I should probably say, to this day) and on the other hand I also wanted my poetics to operate differently than those more right-wing academics__n practice__ven if in their poems or statements they proclaim public leftist views or ideas__hey remain academic poets, operating in elite university-supported circles, institutionalized and reading before institutional audiences, awarding grants and awards to each other, sitting on each other__ grants panels, awards and tenure committees, as Philip Levine admitted in an interview in Don__ Ask, 'giving prizes to friends.

Time travel is a terrifying weapon, far more powerful than anything ever before conceived,' he said grimly.'Mankind just isn't ready for that kind of knowledge. We're like children casually playing with an atom bomb.

It's like I'm dreaming of the imaginary friend Katie and I had when we were little. She'd been so real to us as kids. We each remembered Anna, that's what we'd called her, just like we remembered bits of our parents. But now, in this dreamscape of Paradise Lost, our imaginary third twin has all grown up.

No institute of science and technology can guarantee discoveries or inventions, and we cannot plan or command a work of genius at will. But do we give sufficient thought to the nurture of the young investigator, to providing the right atmosphere and conditions of work and full opportunity for development? It is these things that foster invention and discovery.

Isn't it interesting how nationalistic attitudes foster the notion that being gay is 'un-(fill in your nationality/ religion/ culture here)'?