The Lifelong Poetic Prancings of Mad John

Poetry must be irrational.” – Wallace StevensThese six-plus decades' worth of selected poems listed in alphabetical order by title were written over a span of 66 of your 'mad' Poet's 78 earth-years spent on this particular planet (as of January, 2014). They are about activism, agony, childhood, classrooms and schools, Eros, art, dreams and reverie, grief and exultation, tenacity, audacity, mendacity, veracity, rebellion, recollections relished or regretted, sport, the surreal, situational insanity, injustice, joy, whimsy, making music with words, painting pictures with words, making love with words, friends & family, 'in memoriam,' twilight time, and ultimate timelessness. A handful of them mourn or celebrate the eight or nine ladies who succeeded in tweaking and twisting the Poet's innermost viscera at vital crossings. Some are brief; others are longer. Depending on the topic and the Poet's inclination at the time, some are written in rhymed and metered verse, others in free verse, and yet others as PIPs (poems in prose). Many are painfully (or pleasurably) personal—and with several of them, your Poet includes explicatory commentary. He realizes, too, that he must steel himself in anticipation of possible permanent excommunication by certain not-always-so-anonymous individuals of the distaff persuasion who may become angered upon reading many of the more personal ones, but art must be served at whatever cost! Those who have read my 2010 autobiography A Life on the RUN and/or who know me well have undoubtedly noted that the same epithets my antagonists have used throughout the decades to pronounce me unbearable transpose to similar qualities which my supporters have applauded. The bases for these antithetical views have been a) my detractors' or b) my supporters' respective observations of the world, as well as sometimes their direct or indirect encounters with me. In my two other books published by Harmonie Park Press—What OLD MEN Know (also 2010) and Creative Insubordination (2011)—I strive via iconoclastic and sometimes surreal monologues to lift the veils of our collective consciousness and conscience, and I similarly strive in many of these verses. In multiple ways, we all live on a revolving and paradoxically bipolar plane between dream and reality, joy and agony. Dramatic dreams embody the first theatre created by sentient beings, and they have a far greater 'potential of the possible' than do theatre and cinema themselves. Not even the wealthiest Broadway producer or Hollywood mogul could (or could ever have) set forth the lavish and dramatic productions of certain dreams, even with resort to computer-generated special effects. Yet partially through dreams-and-reverie-sharing, your “mad” Poet can and does endeavor to do just that in many of these several decades' worth of impassioned poems, some which from my earliest teen years I had intended one day to put in a book devoted entirely to my poetry. After having now somehow semi-miraculously managed to embark upon my 79th year mostly in one piece, with many surviving poems either memorized or scribbled in old notebooks salvaged from the bottoms of closets and drawers past two divorces and multiple other sad separations, I have indeed finally accomplished this. I hereby serve up these poems to you in this sometimes tranquilly measured and other times borderline scatological collection (but which more frequently you may hopefully find also to be a catalytic and certainly a cataclysmic one).