In the Dark (2016)

 

“They make the backs of my arms cold and my feet numb and then my head feel like a planet.”

John Kennick

I wrote over a hundred pages of poems during September 2016, poem after poem, day by day, an amazing, exhausting, grief-fueled journey. The other two of those collections (Harvest Moon and Li Po-ems) are also available here and in paperback form on Amazon. On the morning of September 24, I woke up after a fitful sleep with the first two poems in this series fully composed in my head, waiting there in the dark, thus the title. I have no idea how they got there like that. I just went downstairs and typed them up. The rest of the series came to me just like that, out of the dark, though mostly while I was awake, inviting me to type them up. As I thought about this later, I could see it was the classic “descent into the underworld” that is conventional to epic poems, even its duration, three days, standard for a trip down to the dark. I love “dark” poems, both reading and writing them. I hope you will find something to love here, too. Paperback and Kindle versions available at cost on Amazon.com.

Here is a PDF of the series:

In the Dark PDF

 

 Here is my reading of the poems in this collection: