UPDATE: MY BOOK IS OFFICIALLY OUT!!!

This post has been a long time coming, but I am honored and in awe to announce that I am officially a published author. This is truly a dream come true for me. My book, Death By Active Movement: The Certainty of Life through Poetry, has just released on Amazon.com. The book is a collection of original poems exploring the relationship between life and death. The poems are meant to illuminate the concept of death and to show how our own evanescence, the fleeting nature of existence, is precisely the reason why life should be cherished and appreciated. All the wonderful miracles, all the pain, all the sensations, everything it means to be alive is beautiful precisely because it must all come to an end. From love, to the afterlife, suicide, and everything between, the poems cover a broad sweep of subjects, some sweet, some somber, some graphic, some grotesque, but all filled with novel ideas and powerful imagery. Thank you so much for all your support and much love to everyone who orders their copy. 

This is the pinnacle of my life thus far.  

UPDATE
Christine Sampson has just written an amazing article on the West Islip and Three Village Patch covering the book. Give it a read and learn a little bit more about myself and what's between the covers. I'm incredibly honored to have this distinction. Much love to Chrissy for writing the article.   

Kill Yourself Cookie

A very quick update today. I have begun to trudge through the contents of my filing cabinet, which contains hundreds of poems that I have written over the course of my life (some more precious than others). The one I've pulled out for you today is called "Kill Yourself Cookie".
Now, apparently, as I have been told, the group of friends I consider my closest kin happen to be quite creative... and mildly insane (I guffaw at the audacity of "mildly"). Thus, the name comes from my very good man Henry Oakes, who uttered this phrase quite some years ago, to which I felt compelled to document. I set it aside until I found a pertinent poem to attach it to. (I keep a cache of poem titles "just in case"; I feel there is a curious relationship between the title of a poem and the poem itself, in that they don't necessarily need to compliment one another. In fact, I enjoy when a title can evoke something to ponder and the poem can evoke something entirely different).
The poem deals with the notion of our physicality, our relationship to the divine and the universe, reincarnation, and the general plight of knowing, "Who am I?" A rather scatterbrain construction, it reads like a run on sentence and reflects my younger style of writing. I hope you all are starting to get a taste for my technique. Enjoy!


Kill Yourself Cookie

Descend
Transcend my being
Trip through an arch that's been carved from my thighs
Climbing
Higher and higher
To a depth I thought I'd never reach
Beseech me!
I found a pluperfect means of hide and seek
Tickled
Harmonized
A monoxenous Christ
Everything, but seams
I found another hole
To a soul that appeared to me, out of control
I found a mirror that was a window to another Columbus toll
Slip me a slip to pass through, the open doors of crypts stripped of open sores
Too many floors of business
Too many points of interest
Too much to witness
Do you remember when?
I was there
Back when I was fed with horsehair
It was something I couldn't reveal
A bee sting that wouldn't heal
A saint's ring I just couldn't steal
Sympathy I just wouldn't feel
Chastity
You've clamped my little finger
In short-time, lined along a dead sea
Fractured
Compound
Pushed on through
Lick the bowl clean, but leave me the spoon  
Born again
(I've lost track of my birthdays)
Tumbling down the cranks and spells that came standard with the gifts they left me
Frankincence disease
Magi, scorn with pink eye
Dead man's float
touting skulls on a black mattress
Hat tricks
Dining on rabbits
Sixth dimension antics
Fourth dimension intuition
Kickstart conquests, on a mission
Embryonic fluid
(I like it straight)
Shaken, not stirred
Nibbling on the bate
Of time
I withstood all the mammalian elements I could
Too many times I've tasted the batter of enthalpy
Reincarnate the meat
Baptized in the river Styx
Gathered up by the linens of Nyx
Neurotic
Paraphysical
Held dear by the spirits
While condemned to reckon, but never know who I am
To the glass eye of Earth's sky
I've swam in its storms
Ken blotted by a swollen sun
Elegy after elegy
Head stone after stone
The grass stains on a shadow
But the shape never known