PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Bravo!!!!: Bravo!!!!

Sorry I'm just getting around: Sorry I'm just getting around to reading your latest poems. I'm slowly making my way back to the land of the living; still burdened with fatigue and malaise, so my responses will be few and brief for now.   I've often imagined this same sort of spiritual metaphor when you described, in several poems and essays, your harrowing, yet ultimately inspiring, journey from where you began to where you are today.   Here, your allusions to epic classics are striking, spot-on emblems of triumph over joyless, puritanical verbal assault. I'm happy that today you wear your resplendent name with gratitude, remembering the days when it was gifted to you like a blessed shield. May your experiences and the cosmology behind your name be an inspiration to those who still stumble in the dark while galaxies of living light wait beyond.   God bless you.  

Appreciate it!: Thanks Stephen! 

Well stated truth. Really great write.: OOPS!! I hope you were not writing about me.

As I read through your: As I read through your magnificent poems in this form, I am becoming convinced that the Moon is one of your presiding Muses, and I applaud your accomplishment in this series.

Oh, wow!  I have been reading: Oh, wow!  I have been reading Poetry for fifty years, as of this past April, and in that time, I have allowed only a few poems to have the kind of effect this Poem has had on me this morning. First, as a Poet, let me commend and applaud your very skilled use of both metaphor and simile to direct, focus, and enhance the emotional impact of this Poem on the reader.  To me, this is a textbook perfect example, and if I were teaching a class on Poetry, this would be required reading.  And the metaphors and similes are deployed naturally, almost casually, as if emerging from an authentic conversation (and they may have, I don't know the Poem's provenance).   As a son who had problems with my mother, I certainly can relate to the Poem's historical presentation.  My own mother---for reasons no one has ever been able to explain---did a lot to undercut or sabatoge my ambitions (rather they were academic, social, or romantic).  She and my father adopted me---I was not their birth-child---but she seemed almost obsessive about embarrassing me.  (An example---during the summer of 1979, when I spent the entire college break with my sweetheart and my sweetheart's parents in a small town on the other side of our state, my mother sent a letter ahead, explaining to the parents what an unpleasant and inconsiderate person I was, and that she fully expected they would find my presence difficult.) Just by coincidence, while browsing the internet today. I happened upon an article about the ancient Poet Vergil's first book of Poetry.  I have not had a chance to read it yet, but the title suggested that Vergil's Poems in that book dealt primarily with the subject of solitude, and of being alone.  I think your Poem stands in that tradition; and when any poem can stand with Vergil's, that is a mighty fine place to be.

As ever, thank you: As ever, thank you kindly.    I'm grateful that the poem lived up to your generous expectations. I started out with these three lines coming to me:   "so you impale yourself on the shed exoskeletons of demons who parasitized your only captive audience -  your hope and better angels and flew off"   I really felt something possibly worthwhile lay in those lines, and the rest of the poem sprouted out in every direction from there.    Thank you, again. My apologies for not getting back to you sooner, my friend. All the best to you.