A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.

I'm not religious in any formal sense, not in any God sense.

I started writing when I was about thirteen.

In my own mind, I was sort of a desperate kid.

And it occurs to me that if I were aboard a rowboat floating in the middle of all the beer I've drunk in a lifetime, I'd never be able to see the shore.

Uneasily the leaves fall at this season, forgetting what to do or where to go; the red amnesiacs of autumn drifting thru the graveyard forest. What they have forgotten they have forgotten: what they meant to do instead of fall is not in earth or time recoverable the fossils of intention, the shapes of rot.

At a certain age you're always uncertain how other people will take you.