Outside Church

Orgasmic stars and frantic birds. Dangling fruit. Deep waters. The quiet violences of sex and death in their many different forms. If our vocabulary in writing poetry is limited by our obsessions, these recurring, intertwined images are a public confession of some very private obsessions, some of which in the light of day make even me blush. Still, even if I do not or cannot recognize their source in me, I do recognize these obsessions as mine because they bubbled out of me and onto the paper.This book you hold is the ultimate expression of that impulse, of years of on and off again writing while I was busy doing other things, but always somehow returning to the arranging and rearranging of words on paper.The most I hope for is that at least one other person out there finds that one of these poems, or even just one phrase in these poems, strikes a resonant chord of recognition within them the way so many others have struck those chords in me.