Flatterers Among the Roses Does the moon sail in its sumptuous heaven Disfigured by pity, Blindly tearful in an icy lair? To walk in the moonlight, to trod The verdant ambers, and to think of nothing, What sort of matter for a poem is that? Is it a matter of having nothing In the mind, icy sequester Of nothing, of nothingness layered in its own absence? Or is it a matter, rather Of nothingness icily conceived, icily meant? It is a matter of sinister consequence. To walk in the violet moonlight Discussing the moon from which it flares Disfiguring the roses Is a kind of nothing, a suave...

FROM THE "Brief Introduction": Life's bright season, tho' brief, Proves long enough to grow True love, real grief. Here is no pinwheel of variety, no rainbow spectrum discoursing with the white radiance of eternity. Here is concentration, strippages of spirit to their ghostly essence, the "skull beneath the skin" whose grin gives no joy, and whose aspect refuses escape. Within this enforced "simplicity" of style, however, there are themes and memes enough to fill a tangled estuary with dazzle when an oblique dawn condescends to hit it just right. Youth is famously a time to indulge unwise...

A victim of depression during the composition of these verses, I noticed an inability or unwillingness to assign purpose within myself-I was lax and ready to suffer unmitigated disasters with little more than a shrug and a tear. This is really a rather hopeless state of affairs-as a number of the poems outline. I remained staunchly impressed, however, with Dame Nature's capacity to excite the recognition of meaning within myself. As meaningless and adrift as I may have been, I could not help but notice that Nature still evoked in me the wry acknowledgement of a more masterful hand in the...

The main item in the inventory of Venus and Vesuvius, as you will soon plainly see, is an adolescent male I have dubbed Sir Absurdio. Absurdio is left alone on the planet Venus where he was born, the only son of two intrepid scientists appointed to explore our over-heated solar neighbor. Why he has been left so tragically alone, and at such a crucial age, our tale will unfold.

Circumnavigating the Medulla Oblongata A note concerning the basic attitude of this book of stories. The story-telling of a stained-glass window. The minutae of a moment recorded through a fly's eye. The strange tales and weird memos of a modern-day Moses. All these are closer to the spirit of the stories in this collection than the usual DOs and DON'Ts of the narrative art. There's a freedom of freak-dom in being a miniaturist of the psyche, a landscape artist with the pallatte of a portrait painter. Rules are more like napkin sketches of escape plans to cross some foreign border at night,...

A collection of world-history conscious poetry, thumbnail character-portrait poems, and a farewell to the arts by a distempered punk.