In this collection, I turn inward form start to finish. As I was compiling the collection from notebooks that I'd started in some cases thirty years ago, I found that each poem found its companion, one poem, as if one friend at a time.
They served as a way for me to look back and to look inward to examine some of what I've been, who I was at a certain time in my life, who I am now, and where I may be going.
These are poems, I think, that are for those unafraid to ask themselves who they are without expecting a logical or clear answer.
Most of them are short, direct, written in language which I tried to fashion in an inoffensive and conversational way.
The book's title comes from the epigraph I used, which is a quotation I came across in a book about Beethoven. Translated from the German, it's a phrase he expressed, allegedly with exasperation, while working at his piano on one of his symphonies.
Muss es sein? Es muss sein!
Must it be? It must be!
Ludwig Van Beethoven
Here is the Table Of Contents.
I hope it provides a hint of what these poems are like.
As you can see, the book is presented in four parts, each with about the same amount of poems.
Table Of Contents
I.
A Round Theme Cages The Air
Mind The Gnomes
Please Don’t Park On My Ankles
A Toast To Toast
Expect And Fall
History Will Assist
My Jefferson Dreams
Refuge On The Highway
Baroque Aspirations
II.
In Response To The Narrative
Whatever This Importance
Fine Air
Sky Greens
Forgot The Password
The Anteater
Tweet Monger
Have To Call In Sick
Long Drive
Six-Fingered Glove
Election Year Anxiety
Possible Solutions
Abandoned Dreams
Inadmissible Evidence
Speaking As One Of A Couple
Fetching And Eccentric
III.
Bog Standard
Virtue Common As Dirt
Irritable
First Day Of School
Brutal Compassion
Enough With Grime And Ridicule
Arid
The Sideman
Self-Deception
Not Born As Stone
Conviction
Fob On A Chain
Sick To Death Of The Race Hustle
Get Famous Inside Their Heads, Kid
Essential Needs
Faulty Spindle
Gutted
IV.
Elegy For John Woods
For Signore Primo
Such A Joust To Define Any Language
Three Questions
Judee Kutter Riot Grrrl
Fearless And Indestructible
Newly Wed
The Carmen Miranda Copacabana Banana
Perduto Significato
Keys
Psychoacoustic Reinvention
To My Angel This I Offer
Night Sweats And Death Mothers
Lastly, here below is one poem from the collection. I hope you like it.
Time-Ravaged Face
And truth always reveals pain.
It does not shame us.
I love a knife only if it will kill me.
I listen to neighbors whine about schedules.
I understand their grief and urgency.
When you’re in debt, the time is always now.
And we are all in debt.
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