The catacombs of the mind

My Mom used to say "don't do anything you wouldn't do if I was in the room"...a horrific thought to have stuck in one's head after puberty. Fortunately, I have been able to turn that voice off once in a while by sending it to a quiet cell, distant from my moments, or I'd be a raving lunatic of a different stripe by now.

My Mom works in guilt like Rodin worked in stone. Every kid has his point of vulnerability, the idiots who think that one style fits all in disciplining kids is plain, dead wrong. My older brother, the spanking worked on him. My next brother, take something away from him. Me, look me in the eye and play on my guilt.

Anyway, I digress. Heck, I'm digressing before I start the main point...that's pretty whacked.

I spoke with Tag (Dan McTaggart) yesterday and am decided to go ahead and donate a copy of THE COMPLEAT PANTHER CYCLES to the local library. It's a perfect library book...so massive that sitting on the shelf it will not just disappear next to the other volume...it is a thing of beauty, not only for the contents, but for the layout and the lovely cover model, Jillian Ann, whom I cannot say enough about at this time.

I've been spending time just holding the book...it is so heavy and gratifying to hold. I like the sound when I drop a copy on a table, like a fist slamming down to make a point during a heated argument. It's 8-1/2 x 11, not the 6 x 9, for one thing...and thicker than a stack of all my other books combined...I set it on a bookshelf with copies of PanthEon, From Out of the City (Yes, I have a copy of that rare, fair book, of course), From an Unexpected Quarter, Love Gods of a Forgotten Religion, 101 Great Love Poems, INVOCATO and The Morgantown Suite Poems and it was like Jupiter (the planet) showing up for a cocktail party where Venus, Mars, Mercury, Mars, Uranus and Neptune were hanging out...suddenly none of them looked that imposing.

It is the death star of poetry books. For all the emotional baggage it carries, it is the "me" book...even more so than INVOCATO, which is my "greatest hits".

Maybe Barbara Holmes is right, maybe I am arrogant. But Mark Twain said a bird is not bragging when it says it can fly, and I have flown. There's a tiny spot in my brain that never accepted me as a poet, until now. Now that Doubting Thomas has gone to that same corner where hides my mother's voice when I'm with a beautiful woman who asks me to stay the night.

Thank God for the catacombs of the mind.