Children may not notice the positive moments in life unless we point them out to them.

When children are very young you read them books that are positive to help them go to sleep. But there comes a moment when they begin to understand the difficulties of the world. They know there are problems and the books they read should reflect that not gloss over them.

When people ask me about my story I just go through the positive stuff: the tent-pole moments the big landmark checkpoints.

With participation in politics so low at the moment I think Christians should ensure their views are represented at all levels and not leave it to others.

I mean I went to a church school when I was younger and imbibed a certain amount of religion then but it was really in university that I got interested in religion and politics at the same time. I don't think as if it were one moment of conversion but my spiritual journey really began then.

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else poetry in terms of psychology.

The other side of it is that despite all that people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

Naming a baby is an act of poetry for many people the only creative moment of their lives.

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass for new things to happen to us we want to hold on to certain moments we don't want our lives to end.

I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.

You know in my music career there was a moment where the irony was just so heavy. There were people in my audience that were the reason I developed neuroses. These people that tortured my life were using my art my poetry as fuel for them to torture other people.

Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies when a baby is born or when we fall in love.

The moment of change is the only poem.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

A desire arises in the mind. It is satisfied immediately another comes. In the interval which separates two desires a perfect calm reigns in the mind. It is at this moment freed from all thought love or hate. Complete peace equally reigns between two mental waves.

Every day I've got to be thankful that I am alive and you never know - the cliche is I guess you could get hit by a bus tomorrow so you'd better be at peace with whatever you got going at the moment.

Then I realized that secrecy is actually to the detriment of my own peace of mind and self and that I could still sustain my belief in privacy and be authentic and transparent at the same time. It was a pretty revelatory moment and there's been a liberating force that's come from it.