Thank you. It's not every day that one gets to return to the high school from which he graduated to report back on his findings, especially before such a distinguished-looking audience. One discovery of which I think I was always aware, but now understand even better, is that Milton Academy is a truly amazing place.

That said, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to confess that I've gotten into the habit of announcing that "I learned more in one year teaching in juvenile detention camp than I did in all my years of school."

That line, I realize now, probably plays better to an audience wearing orange jumpsuits with "Los Angeles County Probation" stamped across the back, but I felt compelled to share it with you nevertheless. It's just a long way of stating that if you have any issues with what you're about to hear, don't blame Milton, blame the gangbangers.

I'd like to begin my remarks to you today by saying that I'm sure you are all infinitely wiser than I was as a graduating senior. Back then, my interpretation of Milton's motto "Dare to Be True" was limited to don't lie, don't cheat on your tests, and don't dance to Madonna's song "Like A Virgin" -- even if the cutest girl in the sophomore class is pogo'ing around in front of you like a ... (you get the idea).

And I didn't understand the significance of the word "Dare" in the motto either. Being true for me at that time was really just a matter of common sense. I was keenly aware that if I lied, cheated or danced to cheesy pop songs, there could be very real very negative consequences. Courage did not factor into the equation.

But by the time I graduated, I did have a vague sense that "daring to be true" for me had something do with writing. Thanks in no small part to the encouragement of a new English teacher named Rick Hardy, I found my voice as a writer here at Milton Academy. I can still remember the day Mr. Hardy told me that he'd taken the liberty of reading a scene I'd submitted to him out loud to his wife at home the night before. That one comment was more powerfully affirming to me than any grade I ever received. What it told me, and what Milton as an institution reinforced, was that my voice was important, and worthy of an audience.

I left Milton with a passion and a practice. Nothing in my life compared to the joy and freedom I felt sitting down to a blank page with a pen in my hand. I wrote plays. I wrote poems. I wrote for newspapers and magazines. And I wrote for myself. Then, at the age of twenty-four, I decided to move from New York City to LA to become a screenwriter. I sold the first screenplay I'd ever written two weeks after the 1992 Los Angeles riots and halfway through my first year of film school.

Now, when you suddenly have people in positions of power telling you all kinds of flattering things and giving you more money than you ever imagined you'd earn in one year for doing something that you love, it's a heady experience. It was my first real test, and to make a long story short, I failed. I let my relationship to my producer, my agent and the studio supersede my relationship to my own voice, my own deepest creative self. Rather than dare to be true, I was scared to be true. But nothing was scarier than how unmoored and rootless I felt in the wake of that experience. Suddenly, for the first time in my life, when I sat down to write, nothing came out. If there was a whisper of inspiration left in my head, it was drowned out by the deafening roar from all of those other voices I'd allowed into my creative process.

It was then that I stumbled upon an ad in the Writers Guild magazine looking for volunteers to teach writing to incarcerated youth, and as soon as I saw it, I felt a stirring in my gut. That stirring may have been fear, but it was the kind of fear that kicks up when you already know you're going to do something. It moved me -- like nothing had moved me in months. And it scared me a hell of a lot less than the idea of staying stuck in my apartment, continuing to do superficial rewrites on a script and a life I no longer recognized as my own.

Shortly thereafter, I found myself in a Los Angeles County juvenile detention camp. I was there to teach poetry, but in retrospect I realize I was really there to pass along two things I learned at Milton Academy: "Your voice is important" and "Dare to be True." Looking around a little nervously at my first group of students, I saw myself in every one of them, and, for the first time since moving to LA, I knew that I was in the right place. So I just kept going back, and what started as volunteer work became a calling for me.

One Sunday afternoon a couple of years later, my wife Susannah and I were hosting an open-mic poetry BBQ for a group of about 60 people, half of whom were formerly incarcerated youth. And as I was looking around our back deck at this beautiful multicultural gathering, I suddenly realized that I was standing in the middle of the last scene of my screenplay. That script, buried somewhere deep in studio development hell, had ended like a Shakespearean comedy with all of the disparate characters coming together for a BBQ in the backyard of a house in South Central Los Angeles. Somehow, I'd unconsciously manifested an event I'd once only dared to imagine on the page. My screenplay had come to life after all, but not in the way I'd expected.

Now some of you may be sitting there thinking, that's a nice story and everything, but I'm not a writer. But this isn't about writing so much as it's about daring to be true to the stirring in your gut, to the whisper in the back of your brain, to your most fantastic vision of the future.

When we sit in silence and listen for that whisper, or wait for that gut feeling, or conjure that vision, what we are really doing is asking ourselves "Who am I?" It takes courage to ask that question honestly and not reach for the easy answers that others, even the most well-meaning people in our lives, may have provided for us in the past. "Who are you?"

If you're lucky, you may have had some moments in your life, perhaps even here at Milton, when you've felt a sense of peace or higher purpose, whether it was on an athletic field, a stage, in a science lab, at an easel, reading a book, playing or listening to music, or even lying on your back on the quad on one of those gorgeous first days of spring. Remember those moments. Collect and connect them. They are all clues that will help point you toward your truth.

Just be sure to begin within - because if you start by looking outside yourself these days, it's too easy to get disoriented. Never in the history of mankind have we been privy to so much information and so little truth.

What does "Dare to Be True" mean when the number one album on the billboard pop charts at the height of our invasion of Iraq was "Get Rich or Die Tryin?" What does "Dare to Be True" mean when one of the first coherent directions we got from our President in the wake of the 9/11 disaster was to keep shopping?

These are the symptoms of a society in desperate need of truth. And that truth, that solution, that antidote, lies inside each one of you.

So what does "Dare to be True" mean for you now on your graduation day?

In my own contemplation, I've found that gratitude is often a good place to start.

If you're a member of the class of 2006, close your eyes for a minute and picture the people in your life, your family, your teachers, your classmates and friends who have helped you on your journey. The people who have supported you, and challenged you, and inspired you.

If you're a parent or family member of a graduating senior, you're probably already thinking about the young man or woman who has brought you to this place today. How they've challenged you, inspired you and helped you to grow in ways perhaps you hadn't expected.

And if you're a teacher or administrator, you know better than anyone how much these young people have brought to this school community over the years, individually and collectively.

One of the great blessings of my work is that it has made me very grateful for the life that I have, and for the opportunities I've been given (one of which has been the great honor of speaking to all of you today).

I'm going to leave you with a poem I wrote that was inspired by a young man named James Baca. It's called "Soldier Poet" and I want to dedicate it to all of you in the Milton class of 2006 and to all those who have faced death and chosen life.

To me, a soldier poet is a person who combines the wisdom to discern truth with the courage to act on it. My greatest hope for you all is that you connect to the Soldier Poet within yourselves -- because there IS a war going on - not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in our city streets, in our increasingly self-destructive consumer culture, and in our own hearts and minds. And it is a war that can only be won by those who dare to be true to the deep peace from which I believe we all originated.

Soldier Poet

Last week I strip-searched the streets
For a soldier poet
Struggling to make life rhyme
With a bullet-splintered shin
And one long twenty-five to life knife to the forehead
He's still alive
Blind in one eye
Rushed from pimp-walk to gimp-walk
By a symphony of sirens
Heartbeat who-bangin' on his ribcage
Only 18-years-of-age

I found his homeboy
Dying from the same disease
Dry eyes screaming please release me
From this two-bedroom tomb
This dope smoke-filled emergency room
This prison skin - rice paper thin
Tattoos like open sores
Toe-taggin' in the AIDS ward
Still trying to be hardcore

Don't call me doctor
I'm not one
I don't laugh at jokes
But I got one
About a kid with no father
I taught one
His enemigos rolled up
He shot one
They fired back
He caught one
Now he's looking for answers
I brought one
An empty notebook with lines
I bought one
For $1.99
Less than a gun
Last week I strip-searched the streets
For a soldier poet
Struggling to make life rhyme
With hard time
I found him on page three
Right next to me
Scratching his way back to the beginning
With nothing but a pencil for protection
In this mad house of correction
We all call body.