Surprise: On What is Going On Here

Let's make this clear now. I am what Robert Graves would characterize as a poet of the Theme. All my good poems tend to center around the romantic relationships of this turn on the wheel. This is how it is. These poems attempt to describe and catalogue my real relationship to the phenomenol world. I struggle every single day to ascribe some sense of truth to these words, these captured metaphors. It is, I think, remarkably difficult to be truly honest in language and yet live in humility and love. I think that is why most true aesthetes live as hermits and monks. When you farm the territory of the relationship, particularly with sex involved, the ability to see through the forest becomes very tenuous at best.

Yet I believe I am very good at this. Flawed, but still, a greater resource than I would have thought myself as late as forty. Life is an interesting and fluid spell-making journey. I have embarked on it, as have we all, the spirit in mind, but the flesh is the great engine that drives us. I do not see that there is any actual division between these things. This is the hidden wisdom of the mystery religions. This is the act that makes poetry real.

Suddenly, that which was thought mystical becomes the physical act of love. Surprise!