FROM THE "Brief Introduction": Life's bright season, tho' brief, Proves long enough to grow True love, real grief. Here is no pinwheel of variety, no rainbow spectrum discoursing with the white radiance of eternity. Here is concentration, strippages of spirit to their ghostly essence, the "skull beneath the skin" whose grin gives no joy, and whose aspect refuses escape. Within this enforced "simplicity" of style, however, there are themes and memes enough to fill a tangled estuary with dazzle when an oblique dawn condescends to hit it just right. Youth is famously a time to indulge unwise ambitions, and I was no different than a thousand other pocket Napoleons unfolding before the dunce public vast batteplans of conquest that had been concocted by solitary candlelight. Here, too, are dreams of lovers, newscaster commentary on current events glazed over with a punk rocker's dyspeptic gaze, and a cubby stuffed with history notes where Spengler and Nietzsche dance a dark mambo. FROM THE POEM "Unimagined Things": The world must change if we but imagine it. ... Einstein knew that his equation unraveled no new sky -That were indifferent-but was a chant to change his mind. Unimagined things grow real, grow real.