Dance Me Through The Panic Till I'm Gathered Safely In

The collection is here!
 If you get a chance stop by The Fine Art of Design and visit Stacked Bookshop, located inside the shop if you wish for your copy. There is only five, yikes!

 The Un-Included Introduction, If You Will


There always is this yearning, almost dirty desire to be read and to be enjoyed. A sort of exploited desperation that exists within a writer when commissioned to create a collection. It seems almost necessary to title it i seem to have gone blind as well as cover it with headless naked women. Each poem dedicates itself to the idea that "the image of undistorted nature arises only in distortion, as its opposite." Nothing here can be claimed as fact, but nothing can be claimed as fiction.


I was told that this experience is something I will look back on and feel relief. And it really is a beautiful thing, in the way that beauty can be sick and intrusive. As for the recent pieces of poetry, a million thanks, dear Ireland. Finishing this collection brings me the release, the only path of escape. In the process during which I wrote the recent poems, I felt I did not create enough. But now I can remove myself and peer at what I did create, and although it is not much, I created something internally worthy for myself. For what has been created is exactly how I want to remember it.

Grrrrrr.

These Hills Exist

A Cacophony of Silent Redwood Trees




 I woke in Yosemite 
Jamie curled up next to me 
cupping my left breast, platonically
 her body morphs a furnace 
I find myself again 
inside of the tent this time 
with a single sheet tightly wrapped 
like a coroner's bag around my body 
the sun finally stretches its arms 
piercing the microscopic stitching 
and there is warmth 
stuffy warmth 
and the desire to desert the wilderness 




JMI

What Drains Me Most

Piano

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.


In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.


So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.




D.H. Lawrence

I Wish To Be Murdered By A Woman

Skin Debris as Microscopic Human Trace

The Suit


I am locked in a very expensive suit
old elegant and enduring
Only my hair has been able to get free
but someone has been leaving
their dandruff in it
Now I will tell you
all there is to know about optimism
Each day in hubcap mirror
in soup reflection
in other people's spectacles
I check my hair
for an army of Alpinists
for Indian rope trick masters
for tangled aviators
for dove and albatross
for insect suicides
for abominable snowmen
I check my hair
for aerialists of every kind
Dedicated as an automatic elevator
I comb my hair possibilities
I stick my neck out
I lean illegally from locomotive windows
and only for the barber
do I wear a hat



Leonard Cohen Selected Poems 1956-1968

Just to See Her