A Mouth For Picket Fences

Loss. Monotony. Pain. These are all staples of the human condition. We are accustomed to these things and consider them normal. This collection deals with normal people, assumed to be living within the same neighborhood or town, and how they are affected by loss, the presence of evil and the testing of their moral and spiritual beliefs. Broken into three (3) parts, A Mouth for Picket Fences operates with a very subtle narrative thread connecting the three parts. The parts are distributed as follows: Part 1: Normalcy: This group of poems deals with how people cope with the monotony of their everyday lives. These poems are, for the most part, not very dark at all but they do deal with the range of human emotion, from loss to lust and everything in between, as well as how the secrets people keep hidden can eventually shape their perceptions of the world and their lives. There are no overly successful or rich people in these poems. These are normal people, dealing with every day (albeit morose and humbling) human experiences. Part 2: The Darkness Weighs Us: This group of poems opens with "A Mouth for Picket Fences" in which we witness a stranger walking into town and getting along famously with the majority of the residents. Unbeknownst to the townspeople, this man brings with him an evil presence that he scatters throughout the town, thus altering their normal lives into darker, more sinister affairs. These poems deal with the nature of evil, the supernatural and the human tendency to spiral into madness when confronted with the unknown. Part 3: (in)Humanity: This group of poems shows the acts and tendencies people are capable of when exposed to evil or simply some of the darker corners of life. To some, there is a degree of sorrow but the majority of these people have forfeited their lives of normalcy to the darkness and have graciously accepted their inhuman sides.