Poetry is subjective. This fact has been made clear to me again and again over the years. Often poems of mine that I find to be of low merit are held in high regard by readers, while poems I feel to be certain classics are passed over by the same people without fanfare. People interpret poetry based on their education level, their experiences and the acuity of their perceptions. In this essay, I want to make some comments about the free poetry samples on this site for posterity. But in no way do I want readers to feel constrained in their interpretations by what I say. After a poem is written, it is not explanation of the poet that truly matters, rather, it is whatever lies within it that stirs the reader’s soul.

Alone is one of my oldest poems. It was written on a bed back in 1989 in the grip of hopeless despair. I seem to recall writing it after being struck by the phrase, “loneliness, isolation, and fear” in an article in Rolling Stone magazine (by the way I stopped reading that magazine years ago because of my unbearable disgust at the despicable ideas espoused by it). I no longer remember the article itself, but I do remember the poem entering into my head whole after my eyes fell on that phrase. Also, I was listening to Neil Young a lot at the time. I believe that the line in my poem, “Pack my soul and fly away” was subconsciously influenced by the line in the Neil Young song, Sugar Mountain which goes something like, “We took our souls and flew away”. While I am writing this essay, another memory of that song dances in my head. I was listening to that song at about the same time I started smoking, and that song also contains the beautiful couplet, “About the people that you met/And it’s your first cigarette”. It was on a live album that I heard this song, and after Neil sings those words, the whole audience erupts in cheers. I feel terrible for the kids today that – out of ignorance and the barrage of insidious marketing assaulting them – fill their ears with reprehensive crap such as Eminem and Britney Spears which is processed, worthless nonsense without a shred of substance or meaning. (I think I just convinced myself to start listening to Neil Young again!)

When I Die was written when I was at the University of Miami back in 1991. It is a rare “love” poem of mine, because it was not written with any particular girl in my mind. I think that that has led to its universal appeal. Virtually every woman who has heard it was touched by it (as evidenced by the little sigh they give after reading it for the first time). I am immensely proud of this verse. It was also written in one go, and I remember knowing instantly at the time that it was special. I am writing this essay in late February 2003, and up to this moment I have written over 700 poems, but When I Die is one of less than 20 that I consider to be immortal, and one that I am convinced will persist long after my troubled frame has left this sphere.

The Rum, Glum 1990’s employees some stylistic licence in its title. I added a comma to split up the words “rum glum” and the date in order to conjure up the feeling of trudging through molasses. In many respects, I am disgusted by the fact that human communication continues to expand at an exponential rate, but the vast majority of people have absolutely nothing to say. Almost every day I stand in line at the post office with some idiot calling another idiot on a cell phone simply because he cannot peacefully go about his business without violating the personal space of a civilised human being. “Nothing. I’m just here at the post office and I called to see what you’re doing.” It is startling that millions upon millions of people are chatting on the Internet, or talking on a cell phone for hours on end and not transferring one iota of valuable data. I have a fantasy of an Orwellian world, where people would have to fill out a log to justify the information they communicate, and be punished severely if all they do is pass stupidity from one to the other – and in the case of cell phones – expose innocent bystanders to it.

Cigarette. Ah, sweet tobacco. Because of you America was founded. Because of you great minds like Tomas Edison’s realised their full potential. Now you are mercilessly vilified. America would best be served to reverse every satanic politically correct position and treat those that benefit from those lies like how the humble cigarette smoker is treated. What great piece of art or invention over the last two hundred years was not created by a cigarette smoker? And the chain smokers in Spain, Greece and myriad other countries far outlive Americans. Why? Because in those countries people consume pure magic foods such as undistilled olive oil, vinegar, red wine, whole grains etc., and do not subject themselves to the type of stress that Americans do. Is it any accident, that air rage incidents have skyrocketed in direct proportion to the suppression of smokers on airplanes? Where is the freedom? Why can’t a person who owns a bar or a restaurant not allow smoking if he wishes? Non-smokers have the freedom to go there or not to go there. This attack on peoples’ freedoms is unconscionable. Could you believe that smokers are forced to be on planes with people who have the distinct possibility of being terrorists, but are forbidden from smoking because of claims that they are endangering the lives of others? Truly there are no bounds to the stupidity of non-smokers.

I did not realise that Waiting For The Monster To Die was one of my most important poems for a long time. It was actually a lawyer who wrote poetry (not a very good lawyer or poet I must say) who raved about it to me, and that made me re-examine it. The vast majority of people seem to have a monster in their lives, whether a family member or drug addiction – some thing or some one that is the root cause of their despair, and the elimination of this cause always seems to be an infinity away.

Broken is a simple, poignant, straightforward plea for rescue from one’s sorrow When I think about it, I can see that it echoes the same sentiment as Help from the Beatles. Broken should be taken at face value. It contains no allusions or hidden meaning.

Holy has a more elegant feel to it than the poems from Alone: A Poetic Journey Into Despair. It’s a tiny little poem but packed with so many themes: Catholic philosophy, double isolation, poetic love and more. I have always adored the theme of heroic isolation endemic to many of the songs from the British band, Suede (called The London Suede in the US because an American band holds the rights to name “Suede” in their country). In songs such as The 2 Of Us and Black and Blue there is always a couple struggling to keep the despair of the world from poisoning their own relationship, and many times this proves to be impossible.

I have suspicion that the poem Help Me cost me a significant amount of book sales. A book promotion company I hired chose it to feature on a web page about my book Unnatural Attachment. I like the poem a lot and I used it as the first poem in that book. I felt that it made readers drop their guard for what was soon to come. After all, its beautiful plea for love contrasted sharply with the insanity which followed like I Need A Vagina and Every Time I Masturbate. But I believe that a lot of surfers saw it and just thought that my poetry was wimpy and clichéd. Oh well. I hope they will discover this website eventually and get a better idea of my full range.

I Want To Be Your Poet started off as a joke to ex-friend of mine when I sent her flowers years ago. I wrote the opening line, “I want to be your poet/And your poet alone” on the card. The lines stayed with me – and since I have a fascination with obsession – they eventually grew into a poem that is the ultimate expression of obsession. I find it a desperately romantic concept to be a poet to one other person where verse after verse is written about and given to that person, and not shared with anyone else. And I was fascinated by Stephen King’s fears about the somewhat sick relationship between a writer and his readers expressed in such works as The Dark Half and Misery (incidentally, haven’t you noticed that he’s only written garbage since he quit smoking? Hmmmmmm). Of course, this is in no way the reality of my situation: because I encompass many themes and enjoy the idea of sensitive people all over the world purchasing and studying my poems in the hidden sanctuary of their bedrooms or on some college bench under an old tree with only birds for company. But still I have preserved the idea of the insane poet/psychotic reader relationship, in a small way, by using this poem in the flash introduction to this site.

To A.G. is one of my purest “love” poems. But I use the word love more in the sense of the band The Smiths, as opposed to the sense of the band, The Cure. Both of these British bands have produced many beautiful songs. But the thing I particularly loved about The Smiths was the fact that the love described in their songs was virtually always unrequited or unfulfilled. The Cure mostly took the perspective of love that occurred but now is finished forever. So with The Smiths we have Back To The Old House where a guy sees a girl riding her bicycle past his house and him falling tragically in love with her. They never make contact and many years later he recalls her and his feelings and wondering what ever became of her. With The Cure we have Pictures Of You (from the stunningly wonderful and startlingly depressing album, Disintegration) where the protagonists is lamenting the fact that all he has left of a once-great love are useless pictures. Call it my warped sense of love and relationships, but traditionally I see “happily ever after” as a vulgar end. It may keep patrons in the cinema happy as they return to the worthlessness of their lives, but it doesn’t stir me in the least. Give me The Remains Of The Day (Kazuo Ishiguro) any day of the week – the book and film where a lifelong mutually unexpressed love between a butler and maid is gloriously unfulfilled, with not even a kiss. Or even Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love In The Time Of Cholera, where a love is realised after fifty years of waiting, but because of the fact that the lovers are so old, it appears to my eyes to be a grotesque parody of love. To A.G. represents a personal unfulfilled moment. But I suppose that with the creation of that poem, a love that never will be, will in fact actually be for ever. Is there anything less romantic in the world than two people who meet and fall in love and seamlessly spend the rest of their lives together? How pitilessly boring!

I don’t want to comment too specifically about Demon Seed (Flavia’s Song) because, incredibly, I still have some small contact with the person who inspired it (all perfectly innocent I assure you). However, I would like to say that I wrote it one night in Kent, England back in the mid-90s when I had trouble sleeping. I spent hours writing and re-writing it, trying to perfect the complicated structure. I was staying in a pyramid-shaped attic of a cottage there. Perhaps there is something in the claims that the pyramid shape draws in strange energies, because I used to call that attic a “dream machine”. For the six weeks I stayed there, I had many many vivid dreams. From the window of that room, I could see the house where one of the Napoleans (not the important one) had lived in exile. During that trip I was able to fulfil a number of literary fantasies: I visited Lord Byron’s family seat in Nottingham, the house where a blind John Milton dictated Paradise Regained to his poor wife, and drove past the spot where the house of the children’s book writing genius Enid Blyton once stood. The great woman gave more wonder to the children of the world than virtually anyone who ever lived, and was rewarded with accusations of being a racist and other terrible lies in the modern tide of politically-correct sub-human filth. Luckily her immortal works will persist to be enjoyed by a better world than ours. Demon Seed remains one of my best poems, but I know in my heart that it still contains some defects that need to be fixed.

Our Love Fell Like Hitler’s Dream is one of my favourite poems. It compares the death of a love that was supposed to last forever with historical information about Third Reich. Using Nazi imagery to mirror despair in modern art is nothing new. I believe the doom-ladened British band, Joy Division was named after a place where Nazi soldiers kept female captives for rape; and after the lead singer of that band, Ian Curtis, hanged himself, the band reformed under the name of another Nazi phrase, New Order. When I wrote the poem, I had the dramatic image in my head of the horror of a love that was supposed to be immortal, ending in a similar fashion - the Russian soldiers storming into Berlin in 1945 and raping and pillaging and destroying. This may seem a fairly extreme comparison, but the book is called Unnatural Attachment, after all.

When one is involved in a long-lasting unhealthy relationship, it is in many respects like contracting the incurable herpes virus. I think that this is generally what You Gave Me A Virus s About. Even though the poem encompasses many themes such as “sin”, “lust”, “murderous thought” and others, its overriding effect is illustrating the inability of the protagonist to extract himself from an ugly situation. And just like the herpes virus that can lurk unmanifested for long periods of time, only to dramatically re-emerge like the mark of Cain to highlight an unexpiated guilt, so do sick relationships based on obsession go through periods of normality only to explode in moments where its incorrectness becomes painfully clear. The good news, is that unlike the herpes virus, or the mark of Cain, one can through the force of one’s will, (“Life is a will to power and nothings besides.” Nietzsche) extricate oneself and find someone else with whom to get into a healthy relationship.

I was thrilled when I wrote Silence. Before I wrote it, I had come to believe that I might never again produce a perfect rhyming poem like I did years before with When I Die. I remember that I couldn’t get the Joy Division classic song, Love Will Tear Us Apart out of my head at the time of writing it. To my eyes, there is some echo of the style and structure of that song in my poem. I am very proud of some of the rhymes that emerged. Unlike When I Die, which went straight from my head to the paper (through the kind mediumship of a pencil, of course), Silence was written over a period of a few days following a short trip that I made to Boston. I believe that my plane was in the air to Massachusetts at roughly the same time that TWA 800 crashed. So if the hand of fate was whimsical that day, these words and that poem might never have been created. The seed of that poem was planted from a more or less one way conversation with a South American girl that I had had on that trip. That girl remains a distant friend of mine to this day. But at the time the poem originated from the fact that she is a good listener, while I am good talker (though sometime hyperactive and I have a tendency to digress a lot in conversation). I remember using conversation almost like a boxer trying to penetrate the defences of an opponent. I knew that she was very intelligent and her reticence came naturally. When she did speak she demonstrated profound wisdom. I have learned a lot from her, and now continually try to restrain my instinctive garrulousness, exercising more economy in my speech, and saving the pyrotechnics for my poems, and this essay!

I will not write an official conclusion here, because as Morrissey said in the magnificent Smiths’ song Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me: