Proud Gods and Commodores

When I was young I ran with San Francisco's counter-culture revolutionaries, wanting to burn it all down, even a trek to Cuba for a radical meeting with Fidel, cutting sugar cane with him, then at dinner all of us eagerly listening to his self-serving yet sometimes rhapsodic even humorous exhortations on "El Pueblo" and revolution, unleashing within us that 'Ubermensch Derangement Syndrome,' that your humanity is somehow greater than another's humanity, therefore empowering you over them, including of course a lynch-mob if necessary, because people are suffering. Later because of injury I virtually fell into Chiropractic college, a Damascus experience, Saul to Paul. Though this book is not about Chiropractic at all, it does reflect the profound change its study and holistic philosophy inspired in me. What an adjustment is to the body, a good poem is to the soul.

A number of poems in this collection are what's called 'maguffins,' which is an old Alfred Hitchcock term for plot devices, that is hinges upon which the plot swings but really themselves are not essential to the story. A classic example is the stolen money in "Psycho," or the gold or whatever it is in the briefcase of "Pulp Fiction," or even one could say the blackbird itself in the movie "Maltese Falcon," or The Memphis Belle in "Memphis Belle," all just devices to evolve the characters and move the story, yet in themselves are not really essential to the story, or especially to character resolution, just devices to keep things moving along, as opposed to HAL in "2001," a villain at the time when society was paranoid about computers, but 30 years into it, the computer age, HAL redeems himself in "2010," itself a disappointing and pretentious film in which HAL's redemption, courage and self- sacrifice are the most interesting, most noble, and by far the most moving of all the human interactions of that film,...just saying. Several poems in this collection, especially the first, 'The Rape of Athena,' and all of the tales are exactly that- maguffins- their ostensibly written by various characters in the two epic sagas I am currently writing, as well as the several excerpts in these volumes taken directly from those sagas: