FIRST STATEMENT TO THE AUDIENCE This is my story you will see. But how you will see it,

my thousand eyes transfixing this darkness, You will feel it in my blood as I feel it. Not any distance in space.

Not any distance in culture.

Not any distance in time.

Not any distance in language.

Not in blood. Not in hope.

You are me, in this.

Who you will be afterward even you do not know. Oh, my thousand eyes,

my thousand eyes...

from ULTRA

A human bean feels different from her fellow human beans, but learns to value her own special loveliness and value.

Prose aesthetic and malefic. Occasional essays and digressions surging up from the source.
I'm tempted to say that this retrospective collection of thoughts and scribbles will veer from the ridiculous to the more ridiculous. But that would be a slur on the creator, and so I shall refrain from such malignity. Often, very often, I've been told that I over-introduce my tropical topics with a blizzard of disguising digressions. I'm informed variously that this is helpful, too helpful, not helpful at all, and by Jacko Monahan to "just shut up and read da po-EM."
Inexplicably, I'm...

The old blue storm-sign Gets spray-painted over in red: Get lost Irene Sandy. I have never liked to travel, having a dislike of the confusion of new scenes, but I find myself hamstrung at home as well with a deep sense of offended opprobrium at the repetitiousness of the local rituals of the Jersey Shore-beginning with Bar A and ending with the not-quite-naked strip joints like Untouchables that used to line Highway 35 up toward South Amboy. Too lazy to travel, I wait for the busy weather To come knocking.

A sensitive prose endearing of the lovely poem "The Dream of the Rood (Cross)" by an anonymous English poet.

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,...