Moon Gate

This book, as I believe my title acknowledges, was composed under aegis of the moon, most aptly generous source of creativity in the arts, to whom its author was (and is and shall always be) ready to respond, strives to be a reciprocal repository of her largesse. I portend that she shall be somewhat pleased with the outcome (I really hope so).

The moon, by tradition, is the fertile, abundant, and available impetus of the spontaneous vigor required to ignite the internal energy to create, spark the furnace in which to forge the mettle that fuels present and future of a life devoted to the craft of conspiratorial crimes of physiological passion, due to the power imbued in the arts; counterintuitively, perhaps, this practice imparts as well as drains ... One's body would seem to give out, fatigued, yet soul, beyond mind, continues to persist, to overcome. As the reader is aware, delirium is a state akin to an adrenalin rush once received-an offshoot of lunacy, in certain esoteric (schools), storied and buried, original-language disciplines, noted within these pages: The connection reflects, as if the segments of a well-wrought sentence. Focus of utterance of meaning, an incantation in effect of the subject's urge to describe, subsequently to be described (nearly physically painful to portray, to utter, material given over to pass, to be expressed, to be gifted enough to be expressed; to be given birth to or vomited, that are physical functions with spiritual counterparts if nothing exists to deliver, then the heave of building results amounts to dead air, are stillborn.

The moon is primary among the chthonic deities of mankind-the moon, in fact, is a goddess (rightly so) whose prowess was nonpareil. She commands the night, illuminates shady recesses, reverses, channels and directs the dark and its darkness, its hidden forces. She sports a lordly sable mantle that shields and clothes mankind, whom she finds trembling, cowering in the damp, dangerous shadows; she regiments the terrestrial, glowing earth. No other winged celestial divinity controls the monstrous underbelly of nature as she does, demonstrably-as queen of so-called occult wisdom and where it dwells, she merits some quota of worship, some regard, respect.

The "Gate" referred to in my title is simply the entrance by which we obtain an audience with the goddess, as one of her acolytes-an entrance both opulent and humble, always open, always welcoming. Therefore, the presence of the moon infuses each poem included in this book (at least I tried to allow her in), bizarre as they become. And so each poem should not be taken lightly: The moon affects consciousness in a serious manner, which should be remembered and granted laud. Those sciences involved recognize her presence on earth, in the immediate strata of space. Matron of the mysterious, our moon attains to facets of existence that we may not fully comprehend. We do not. Mankind, at present levels of awareness, physical and spiritual, fails to expand our telescopic viewpoint, though taken back to school time and again. The poems in this book attempt to gather and document the sage experience to be gleaned from the moonlight.