From the Introduction

I know: you hate poetry. Too many nights spent trying to memorize Hiawatha? Too many English teachers with too many red pens? How about poets themselves? Dont they seem determined to conceal as much as they reveal, leaving you abandoned in a minefield of obscurity?

Personally, I think presentation is the culprit. Poetry is meant to be experienced in four dimensions, not two. If I had my way, this book would have a big button you could push, like in a sci-fi movie, and out I would pop! Reading, singing, shouting. With music and colored lights and maybe even some birds and butterflies zooming around.

But until technology catches up, were stuck trying to fit a fat round peg into a skinny square hole. I remember way back when. I was poet-in-residence at an elementary school. I asked my class to make folders to keep their poetry in. One little boy made his out of purple construction paper, and he covered it all over with little-boy doodles: jet planes, racing cars, pirate ships, skulls, crossbones. And across the front, in big block letters, he wrote POETRY IS MY WAY TO LIVE.

Like everybody else, Im mostly lost on this journey called life. Poetry is my pull yourself up by your own bootstraps way to live. When things get dark and messy, I write. The act of putting pen to paper making order out of chaos is itself a beacon, lighting the way through confusion. My poems are self-created signposts, if you will. They point. Nudge. Move me in a certain direction. Until the next chaos overwhelms, and I need to write my way into some new knowing.

Thats why Ive given you a prose explanation a context for each poem. I hope that by sharing with you the slice of life from which the work evolved, my beacon might light up your darkness. My signpost might provide you with a little direction. That is, after all, what poetry is meant to do: transmit from heart to heart, from spirit to spirit, whatever wisdom has been granted the poet along the way.

May these words catalyze your deepest knowing.