from
More Miscellaneous Shit I Thought Wasn't Too Bad,
So I Typed It
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   These are poems from my second collection, shit I like to think of as still humbling but shit that strived for greater things.  Written from 1997-1998,
poems in this collection include those that revolve around insipid standbys of love and loneliness as well as those that seem to start to observe and comment
on what I'm watching happen around me.  I was a freshman at Middlesex County Community College, reading more than I had ever done in my life and still
working 2 jobs.  It was also at this time, with my first volume of poetry in-bag, I started to attend any poetry reading I could...not good ones mind you, but
reachable, suburbia readings.  I was turning into a poetry reading junkie.  Poems from this collection were later integrated into my first book.
 Since the love/lust/lonliness poems are still too embarrassingly awful to share with anyone except my own shame, with one or two exceptions, those below
are of the "I wonder if I could do that" variety.  One of the longing poem exceptions, The Phantom She, was an exercise in trying to write a poem of
want that didn't quite suck. To accomplish this I borrowed a bit of attitude from a newly-loved poet, Charels Bukowski.  Pairing Off, published in
Pennine Ink, was written about my best friend's relationship at that time, which was causing nothing but strain on us both for entirely different reasons.  
Published in Pulsar Magazine, Afraid of the Americans, written some time after David Bowie's release, was inspired by...by...lord knows...a lingering
song chorus and watching the news?