Shedding Skin

The poet's life tends, historically, to be a tortured one. This seems to be due to the overwhelming tides of emotion and sensory views that give them inspiration but make it difficult to view the world as it is. A surreal storm of haunting mental images, photographs of the real, unreal and unimagined crawling into the mind's eye and then picking up speed until the poet is in an ecstatic, dervish-like frenzy of thought. This is the overriding dilemma of the poet's experience. He can describe the world as no one else yet in so doing cannot experience it like everyone else. The poetic muse can be a cruel mistress, fleeting and maddening yet seductive and overpowering. Raw animal passions, anger, intense visuals of an underworld lying just beneath the surface of normal thought. This book is an attempt at reconciling the poetic dream with the realities of life.