The poems in the manuscripts listed to the left were written over a time period of approximately one-quarter century.

       

        From the outset, their creation was paradoxical: I wrote to be heard, yet I increasingly chose to write in isolation. A person of words in a zone of silence.

               

        I have lived my life passionately -- some might say aggressively. This has had the virtue of exposing me to life's tumultuousness, its rawness. Unfortunately, the same emotional makeup also has facilitated my going off on ego-driven excursions down paths that led nowhere.

 

        William Blake, the 18th century writer and painter, proclaimed, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." But as John Clellon Holmes wrote in his novel The Horn, such wisdom's price is often high -- i.e., disorientation and near-madness. Holmes makes this clear in his description of an improvising jazz soloist: "In Edgar's furious, scornful bleat sounded the moronic horn of every merciless cadillac shrieking down the highway with a wide-mouthed, giggling boy at the wheel, turning the American prairie into a graveyard of rusting chrome junk." Holmes emphasized that such creativity contained not only a dark freedom but also "the idiot snarl that filled the jails and madhouses and legislatures" and that foretold "some final dead-wall impact."

         

        As Holmes implies, we romanticize the discovery of truth at our own risk. More often than not this discovery is like a head-on collision in the dead of night. It's terrifying and painful and there's blood all over the road. But no matter how much it can shock and almost destroy us, the truth still liberates.

       

        I believe this. This belief feeds much of my writing and is the reason I feel compelled in my work to explore not just my own psychology but also to speak in some of my poetry through other people's voices. No individual possesses just "one" voice. We all, to one degree or another, speak in tongues -- that is, our attempts at communication are spawned by the constant dialogues that occur within us between our different personalities, urges, beliefs, etc. Those who try to repress this inner diversity through the cultivation of a single "coherent" voice mangle their souls and sentence themselves to shallowness.

       

        But there is no need for this to happen. Although sometimes frustrated or enraged, nihilism is something I left behind long ago. I have met, and been helped by, too many good people to mope through life thinking there is nothing good in the world. Instead, I have, for better or worse, evolved over the years into a person who is equally committed to confronting head-on the butterfly weed's disorienting blaze of color in the middle of a field and the suicide bomber's desperate hope for meaning through self-annihilation. I condescend to neither weed nor the militant. Meaning is everywhere. Blinding ourselves to it only leads to more pain and idiocy.

       

        Such feelings, and related ones, are expressed in various shapes and forms in my poetry. Every day we deal with a gamut of emotions and challenges. At every step of the way we confront not only our fear of failure but also the imagery of salvation, not the salvation heralded by the Institutionalized Church's dogmatists or the dominant political parties' speechifiers, but the salvation-potential of creating history -- and creating poetries (not just of words, but also of action, focus, self- and group-nourishment, etc.) out of that history -- rather than being crushed by it

       

        Like most people, I look for "signs" to tell what the world is like and what my life means. In doing this, we are all prophets, all interpreters.

        

        Here is the ground along a path that leads from one place to another.     

 

        Here is someone's brain.

 

        Here is the panther on my son's arm.

 

        Here is the peace symbol on my daughter's.