Subject: Jerry Smith, Blazing Trails

Afterword

I considered making this a FOREWORD, but I decided that it probably would be best if you read the poetry first, letting each one stand or fall by its own merits. Now that you have read, or at least skimmed, 'em, I will tell you the tale of how these came to be.

I thought of introducing each poem individually, but rejected that. There have been several distinct periods in my life, each impacting on my writing, often utterly changing the direction of my career. Each of these periods produced some representative poems, occasionally dozens of them in a single day. Short paragraphs at the beginning of each piece would not give as clear a picture as stringing them all together in a single narrative. I think this better illustrates how each came out of the events of my life. This then is something of a mini-autobiography.

Why an alphabetical arrangement of these poems? I have tried several orderings for this over the years. This is the third time I have collected together a book of my poems. The previous books were SOMETHING FOR MY FANS (Summer 1984), and before that SNAPSHOTS OF A MIND (1977, or so). This book includes much of what was in them, plus new pieces.

In those chapbooks I tried placing these works into categories, but some pieces refused to fit into any particular "type" or subject matter, while others could easily fit into several. One example of the problem of trying to figure out where pieces ought to go is OVERTURE, which was used as the frontispiece for SOMETHING FOR MY FANS. Now, I really don't think its good enough to be the first poem in a book. In fact, I really don't think its good enough to be in this collection at all, but I like it for some dumb reason -- go figure.

Some readers have suggested presenting the poems chronologically. I considered that, but frankly, too many of my early pieces are simply not good enough to warrant being placed at the beginning. I have added a Chronological Listing after this "outtro," should you wish to go back and reread them in the order written. There have been times, such as while on a month long rail trip, where reams of poems were turned out, poems that I think are better distributed throughout the book, which would not have been possible in a straight chronological arrangement. It seems to me that this current alphabetical offering is particularly readable. I admit, I did change the names of a few poems to place them where I wanted them.

Perhaps I should say a few words about my childhood ... Ah, Doctor, can I stretch out on this couch? First off, I was adopted. I believe that if you add my adopted parents IQs together you will find that figure just a smidge higher than mine. Honestly, I think they bribed an adoptions officer to get me.

My father, an Eastern Oregon cowboy who returned from WWII to work as a machinist for a Defense Contractor, came home from work each evening to our 1950s Southern California suburban tract home, flipped on the TV, settled into his Lay-Z-Boy, and for all practical purposes vanished. Weekends were spent worshipping together -- in front of the TV. The way I remember my childhood is, the only time my father spoke to me was to tell me what a useless piece of shit I was. Doctor, do you think that he was jealous of my Mother's paying more attention to me than to him? I have never really wanted her attention, though, as she babbles on endlessly about nothing for hours. Yeah, Bart Simpson has it way better than I did!

For my first 5 years we lived in Perris, California, a desert edge community 17 miles south southeast of Riverside, the county seat, perhaps 80 or 90 miles from Los Angeles. We lived in a trailer behind my maternal grandparents home. It was wonderful. Then we moved closer to Riverside, first to Arlington, then to West Riverside, which is also known as Rubidoux, where we bought a brand new tract home. I lived there from First Grade to my Freshman year in High School. In the mid-60s my father went through several jobs in several towns as the defense industry shifted from post-war, losing contracts, to Viet Nam, new contracts for new companies. I went to four high schools in all -- Rubidoux in West Riverside; Montclair in Montclair, California, a "bedroom" community on the San Bernardino side of the Los Angeles/San Bernardino county line; then to Ganesha and finally Pomona High, both in Pomona, a city of 300,000 plus people in Los Angeles County, about 40 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.

I grew up in a home where The Arts and Culture (beyond that broadcast by NBC, CBS & ABC) played no role, whatsoever. I never saw my father read a book in my entire life (except once I caught him reading a "one-handed reader"). Nor was my mother a reader. She leafed through women's magazines and the TV Guide. Hanging unframed pictures of kittens and puppies pulled from those magazines was as close to Art as she ever got.

The only radio we owned was in the car and it was tuned to a Country and Western station (KWOW). Honestly, I did not know there was any music beyond C & W until I was in junior high. Hearing the Beatles played on a transistor radio by some black girls at the back of the school bus hit me with the force of a religious conversion. Oh, I had heard classical music on the TV as background, all right, but it hadn't occurred to me that people could actually listen to it, all by itself. And, of course, I had been forced to sit through Lawrence Welk every Sunday night before WALT DISNEY'S WONDERFUL WORLD OF COLOR came on, but Lawrence Welk wasn't really Music, was it? I mean, Lawrence Welk was television, and music is on the radio (out in the car), not on TV, right?

An only child with completely disinterested parents, I was a nerdy, unpopular kid. Too small for sports, I had nothing to do but read. Lacking any parental direction, I read science fiction and fantasy, which satisfied both my need for intellectual stimulation and gave me escape from a miserable childhood long on boredom and verbal abuse. What I lacked in breadth, I made up for in depth. I started reading juvenile sci-fi at age 8; by 12 I had graduated to adult books (the hard stuff?). By the time I started high school I had read every sci-fi book in the Riverside County Library System and most in the Los Angles County System! By the time I finished high school I had read over 10,000 sci- fi and fantasy books -- and, unfortunately, little else.

My first experience with poetry was not positive. The little I read in school I hated. Frankly, sonnets baffle me. All those established structures and verse forms seem to me to get in the way of making one's point. I was in high school in the late '60s. Rock lyrics were the only "poetry" I liked. However, stuff written in strict rhyme, particularly rhyming couplets, has always annoyed me, and does so to this day (I am sure that there is a reason why "rap" rhymes with "crap"). That is why I seldom rhyme and hardly ever adhere to any established form, much less meter. In part I got into writing poetry because I couldn't find anything I liked -- a case of the old "if you want something done right, do it yourself," I guess.

My earliest poetry, written while I was in high school, and a little later, when active as a science fiction fan writing for fanzines like the Valley Amateur Press Alliance (ValAPA), was childish, truly awful, tripe. Some of this junk gave me chums a larf, like MAD IS WHAT FANS BE (from 1967 or so, not in this collection). Although my writing during this period was crap I got hooked (... on a feeling?). One piece particularly comes to mind. Called THE WHITE SHIP (also not in this collection) it was a reflection on race relations. From it I discovered that I could make weighty philosophical statements in verse form, something of an epiphany for a sixteen-year-old. Unfortunately, it bore too close a resemblance to a song of the same name by the acid-rock band H.P. LOVECRAFT.

After reading sci-fi for a decade I felt ready to write it. As I got older my passion for writing only grew. Today, I am happy to say I have seen my work in print hundreds of times -- scores of non-fiction articles and news stories, perhaps a hundred fiction pieces (over a dozen porno novels, and half-a-hundred porno "letters" alone) and uncounted dozens of poems. I am even happier to say that I am cashing an ever-increasing number of checks! Click to Amazon.com for me latest Magnum Edipus, er, Opus, HAARP: THE ULTIMATE WEAPON OF THE CONSPIRACY from Adventures Unlimited Press (1998).

In 1972 I left my parents home for the first time and moved to Klamath Falls, Oregon with two hippy friends, Orion Sparrowhawk, a fellow sci-fi fan, and his girl friend, Willow Moonwind. There I met Ina, my "one true love," in 1973 (and lost her in '74!). TEAR is but one of the dozens of sappy poems that I wrote that love-demented summer. TEAR is one of the handful of autobiographical poems that appear in this collection. Most of the works in this book are fiction, short stories in verse form. TEAR is one of the few that really did happen and is somewhat self explanatory. I kept it mostly because that love affair, short though it was, had a profound, even devastating effect on my life and it seems to me that at least one artifact from that era should be preserved.

I actually lived in Klamath Falls two different times, at either end of the '70s. A few other poems from that first period are also preserved here. RAIN AND SNOW from July of 1973 was my first attempt at haiku. Haiku is a Japanese form of poetry. Traditional haiku has three lines, each of counted syllables; five syllables in the first line, seven in the middle, five in the last. As well as that structure, a traditional haiku will paint a picture, then quickly look way, causing the reader to have a new thought or sudden realization. Of all my haiku the only one I think that really adheres to the traditional formula is DRY FLY HAIKU.

Like many of my other haiku RAIN AND SNOW was used as an opening verse to set a mood for a longer piece. Snow, mountains, lakes and other Oregon images appear over and over in my work, far more so than scenes from the 'burbs were I grew up. Oregon, state of my adopted father's birth (and Grandfather's and Great Grandfather's deaths), became my true home. To this day it is to nature, not the city, that I go to for spiritual refreshment.

THE ADEPT was written some time in 1974. It was intended as a submission to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Somehow, I never got around to mailing it off. However, I did get considerable mileage out of it, leaving it as a note on my door when I went away. Tiring of THE ADEPT, I wrote EXPERIENCE in June of '75 as a replacement note for folks finding my house empty.

About this time Jim Keith, another sci-fi fan and friend from my high school years showed up at my home in Klamath. Back in the late '60s Jim Keith and Larry Neilson and I had published a small press science fiction fan magazine (fanzine) together. We never got around to naming to it, so it was known simply as UNTITLED. Its letter column got spun off as a zine in its own right under the title of RAPZINE. UNTITLED received a great deal of critical acclaim. If anything, it suffered from excess originality. Each individual copy was unique, such as with hand painted illustrations, cardboard cutouts and tipped in fine art prints. Both Jim and Larry are now deceased.

We received an article for UNTITLED from an old time science fiction fan and Dianetic "Clear" named Jack Harness (for an understanding of "Clear" read DIANETICS: MODERN SCIENCE OF MENTAL HEALTH by L. Ron Hubbard, and for an understanding of Hubbard read BAREFACED MASSIAH by Russell Miller). Jack's article was entitled NON-FICTION and was a description of incidents that he said he had remembered from 3 billion years worth of his past lives, with connective material of scenes from the Dianetic "auditing" that had allowed him to remember it.

I thought it was all hog wash. Or rather, since at that time I was taking acid (LSD) and getting "memories" of past lives, Scientology struck me as being "expensive acid." I had known Jack for a short while through science fiction "fandom" before receiving his article and thought that if he was clear then clear was something that I very definitely never wanted to be. Poor Jack struck me as being about as clear as mud.

But Jim Keith was intrigued and launched into reading every book on or about L. Ron Hubbard (LRH), Dianetics or Scientology he could get his hands on. About that time UNTITLED/RAPZINE died and I moved to Klamath Falls with Sparrow and Willow, Larry moved to the San Francisco Bay area and Jim Keith went to Kansas City, MO.

By the time I saw Jim again nearly four years later in K. Falls, in 1974, he was a devotee of LRH, had been on staff for a while and had had quite a bit of "auditing" (also called "processing" or "pastoral counseling"). Larry Neilson also had gotten into, and out of, Scientology. Jim moved in with me and stayed on in the Klamath area for about another decade. While being my house guest in 1974-75 he babbled daily about his 'wins' in Scientology and the superiority of 'the Tech.' This would have a hell of an impact on my life, as you will read shortly.

Sometime in late 1974 I discovered the pleasure of getting drunk and scribbling dozens of poems in a single session. While no whole usable poems came out of that exercise I did get a wealth of good lines and images that would be used later. For decades I have collected lines of poetry and kept them like beads in a box waiting for a chance to be strung into word necklaces. Examples of using (and/or being) these bits and pieces of verse are THE KISS, SOFT AS THE TINGLE OF, I MET YOU IN A DREAM, (A Case of Watchers) SYNDROME, WORLDS IN THE MORNING, SONG OF THE OCULIST, DOES YOUR HEART TAKE BRIBES?, HE STEPPED INTO THE AWAITING ..., NEW WORLD DISORDER and, the currently under construction piece, WHERE THE OWNER OF A LONELY HEART SHOPS.

SILVER WINGS (11/10/74, not in this collection) was my first lengthy attempt at a short story in verse form. First I wrote a prose story from the point of view of a seagull, then decided to try the same piece as a poem. It had its moments but I don't think it was good enough to be worth repeating here; in part because it was inspired by the book and film JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL -- so sue me.

RED BOOK RHYME was one of the last pieces written during my first sojourn in Klamath, in June of '75. Around this date I began to feel like I was actually starting to get somewhere with poetry. With RED BOOK RHYME I began to take writing poetry seriously, although I didn't much like the sappiness of this poem. The RED BOOK in the title is, of course, the woman's magazine. This poem struck me as the sort of junk RED BOOK would publish. I never mailed it to RED BOOK to find out -- at RED BOOK's pay scale of one dollar per line, the $14.00 I would have made on the piece never seemed worth the bother.

In 1975 I went on what was supposed to be a 1 or 2 week vacation to San Francicso to attend a Science Fiction Convention over the July 4th weekend. A series of highly improbably events ended with my inadvertently joining staff at the Scientology organization there. After 3 months of living on friend's couches I returned to Klamath with the mission to make some money, then, when ready, return to staff in S.F.

When I got back to Klamath Jim Keith was a few weeks short of going to press on the first issue of a new newspaper. While I had been in S.F. he had been hitchhiking around Klamath. When he got picked-up he asked his benefactor if they knew where he could get a job. One day he got picked up by this old bird named Ben Horn. Ben was a tax protester and tax consultant who also had a passion for free press. Over some years he had been publishing an odd little paper called THE COFFEE BREAK, a radical rag for octogenarians! After discovering Jim's background as a writer and amateur publisher Ben gave Jim unlimited use of his office, offset press and related equipment. Jim was ready to go to press -- except he had little material and less advertising! I became the paper's lead reporter and, as lead salesman, its main source of income. This tabloid newspaper was called SKYLINE: KLAMATH FALLS.

SKYLINE: KLAMATH FALLS was not my first "newspaper" job. Two or three years earlier I had helped a buddy, Perry Chesnut, start his own newspaper, THE LINKVILLE STAR. Klamath Falls' original name was Linkville, as it founded by somebody with the last name of Link. I did all of the graphic design and layout on the first issue, giving the zine its "look." Unfortunately, I am not easy to work with, in fact, as a boss I am a screaming asshole. During a production session for the second issue two of my subordinates mutinied. As I recall, they were an upscale hippy couple, the MOTHER EARTH NEWS back to the land, Marin County-type. They were mellow and laid-back and my DO IT NOW!!! style upset them. They went to Perry and told him that either he fired me or they would both quit. We were all volunteers. Rather than loose two people, he asked me to quit. He got out one more issue of THE STAR, then the folks who got me sacked walked. With zero staff he was forced to fold the paper.

As alluded to above, I began my publishing career in Science Fiction Fandom's little "literary" magazines. After producing my first zine in 1966 for the Pomona Valley-based Valley Science Fiction Association (ValSFA)'s bi-weekly, "ValAPA" I was hooked. I was active in the zine scene throughout the late '60s and early '70s. I appeared regularly in APAs (Amateur Press Alliances, like the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society's weekly APA "APA-L"), as well as in many general distribution fanzines, called genzines, like our UNTITLED and RAPZINE. One of my first sci-fi short stories to be published appeared in ASHWING, a genzine out of the Pacific Northwest.

APAs are a sort of trading club. Each member produces his own zine, usually only a few pages long. The contributing member then gives a stack of his zine to the APA's official, usually called something like Disty (for Distribution) Collator (DC) or Official Editor (OE). The DC then creates a table of contents, cover and so forth and gets all the issue, usually called a Disty or Mailing, collated and handed out. You put in a stack of your zine and get back one of everybody's.

My stint in APAdom culminated with my founding of the fantasy fiction oriented club, The Unicorn Society, and its Unicorn Amateur Press Alliance (UnAPA) in Klamath Falls in 1974. I reasoned that if one could use virgins to catch unicorns, then the reverse, using unicorns to catch virgins should work. It did.

Jim and I did SKYLINE: KLAMATH FALLS for 3 months (six issues). It never did all that well financially, and besides, I had become a "true believer" in Scientology. I was thinking that the only really important thing to be doing in this life was to "help Ron Clear the planet." So, when it looked like Skyline wasn't going to make me enough money to get back to S. F., I joined Scientology's urban monastic order, The Sea Organization (The SO).

In Klamath Falls one December night during a heavy snow storm Jim and I sat in the editorial offices of SKYLINE waiting for our printer to show up. He never did. I got fed up and started digging in a shoe box I had full of fliers from Scientology orgs, looking for the star and wreath emblem of the SO. I called the first one I found.

I reached a Mike Lucero, the Director of Personnel (Dir Pers) at ASHO Foundation. I had no idea what an ASHO was, but it was SO, so what the hell. I asked him if they handled staff PTPs (Present Time Problems) and Lucero assured me that they did provide a full benefit package of free accommodations, free uniforms, free food, etc. Of course he left out that the staff allowance (pay) was $17.20 per week, or that berthing was six to eight people crammed into a standard sized hotel room, etc.

The SO org I joined was in Los Angeles, in the District known to the world as Hollywood. Called The New American Saint Hill Organization (ASHO), is was divided into a day time organization (ASHO Day, or just ASHO) and one that was open evenings and weekends called ASHO Foundation (ASHO Fdn or ASHOF). Much to my surprise I discovered that I had joined up with the Foundation org.

In that first phone call from the SKYLINE offices I had asked if they had any positions open in their publishing department or on their magazine (ASHOF publishes a mag called CAUSE, while ASHO Day publishes THE AUDITOR).

The Dir Pers told me that there was an opening as Editor of CAUSE, and that if I dropped everything and got there right away, he could guarantee that I got it. I had always dreamed of someday being the Editor of a real mag, not some dumb fanzine, or shoestring make-it-go-right "shopper." I dropped everything, gave away most of my possessions and caught a bus to L. A. with just a few changes of clothes in an old backpack, leaving everything else behind. I arrived at ASHOF on December 7, 1941--err, 1976, three days after placing that phone call.

After a stint in the SO's equivalent of Boot Camp I returned to ASHOF to be assigned to my permanent position. Was I assigned to a job at CAUSE MAGAZINE, as promised. Oh, no. I was "posted" to duty in the ASHO "galley", the crew dining (mess) hall. But I wasn't on a ship, the "galley" was a rented Cuban Night Club on Beverly Blvd. It was SO messes by day, Salsa dance music by night, and a billion cockroaches all the time! After the leisurely pace of hippy communal living in Klamath, the uniformed regimentation of the pseudo-military SO was a nightmare. I worked all day and studied Scientology most of the night. I had no time to myself, hardly ever getting more than a few hours "shore leave" per week; barely enough to do laundry or see a movie.

In the SO there is "The Code Of A Sea Org Member." In it you pledge, on your sacred word of honor as an SO member, to do and to refrain from doing a number of things. One is that any SO member will "make things go right" and trained or not, an SO member is expected to carry out any task or duty assigned to him. There was no way out, I had been shafted and per the Code I was expected to "make it go right," a phrase I came to hate.

In the galley I went into a deep despair and was so messed up I didn't know what was happening for months. I was caught up in a routine of working in the galley all day, and forced to take staff training courses at night I did not want. I blew course (to blow, is to take an unauthorized leave, or make a sudden departure from an area, i.e. go AWOL) whenever I could. Mostly I was just tired and depressed all the time. In those days I hardly ever got out of the galley, hardly ever even saw daylight.

Something truly remarkable happened to me in the ASHO galley one day. I met someone I knew from thousands, or possibly, millions of years ago! At this point I had been in Scn about a year (3 months at SFO, 3 months in K Falls then maybe about 6 months at ASHO) and was still a wee bit of a doubter. There was a guy who was a new recruit at ASHO Day. I had seen him around for a day or two and something kinda familiar about him had struck me, but we hadn't spoken. In those days the galley, like every other part of Scientology was way undermanned and to get the job done the crew were assigned KP (Kitchen Police) duty on a rotating basis. The crew hated it! About his third day at ASHO this guy pulls KP during the lunch hour, and we end up working together.

This rented Cuban nightclub did not have a dishwasher! We had to wash all the dishes by hand. Picture if you will a cramped rectangular shaped room. Down one wall is a sink with soapy water, a drain board, and another sink with scalding water. In the center of the room is a table where the dishes, after being rinsed in the scalding water, are placed. I am at the soapy tank, he's at the scalding tank with thick black plastic thermal gloves on.

At one point I set some soapy dishes on the counter between us, and as he reached to pick them up It Happened. Our eyes met and simultaneously, we both thought the same thing/got the same mental picture/said the same thing! We both got this vision of our being members of the crew of a three man starship. I had a very clear picture of the ship and what we did. Simultaneously we both recognized each other and shouted "You were my copilot!," Astonished that we had both just shouted the same thing we realized that it was true, we did know each other from umpty-ump zillions of years ago, and our "visions" must have been nearly identical, as we both remembered our ship as a three man ship, for he said "Where's the other guy?" at the same time that I said "Where's the engineer?"!!!

We embraced like long lost brothers but couldn't talk as we were in the middle of the lunch rush and the dishes were stacking up. Later that afternoon he was sent to the SO world headquarters, The Flag Land Base in Clearwater, Florida, and I have never seen him (or the engineer for that matter) since. I never even found out what name he was going by (this lifetime). Well, you can well imagine that this helped to convince me that I was On To Something, and (now I realize) mistakenly thought it was Scientology.

There I wrote the first of what would become hundreds of poems in the Scientology mind set. Perhaps the first of my Scientology inspired poems was WHAT IS THE SOUND OF ONE TERMINAL COMMUNICATING? In Scientology a "terminal" is a live communication point, that is, a staff member.

I was not happy, to put it mildly, about not having time to write. I started scribbling bits of, and notes for, stories and book ideas on scraps of paper and napkins. GRAVESIDE MANNER and STORM were just exercises in word play. Likewise with the somewhat later written POSTCARD (6/3/77). It was really just a lengthy setup for the last line, which is a joke. Another "joke" was THIS PICTURE IS A POEM. It was written on my 26th birthday. I was sitting in the Cuban nightclub's bar getting drunk and feeling sorry for myself because no one was there to celebrate my birthday -- but unbeknownst to me a surprise party was waiting for me to show up in the galley (a few feet away)!

YORE (6/3/76) was, I think, my second attempt at haiku. I really didn't have much time for anything longer! Curiously, it took me a good six months to figure out what it meant. It just came out of me, all in a moment, leaving me to spend months puzzling out what the damn thing was about.

IN THE SYLVAN SPOTLIGHT was written August 30, 1976. Once, while hiking up a trail in the mountains in Southern California in the late 1960s a group of us passed by a guy strumming a guitar while a girl lounged, striking a provocative pose, nearby. That image stuck with me and in a fit of "wishing I were there" I wrote SPOTLIGHT as a variation on the theme.

Up until that point in time I had never been a coffee drinker, in fact I probably had not had more than five cups in my whole life (unlike today, where I have already had five cups this morning). On the 27th of September, 1976, the Officer's Steward made a pot of iced coffee. Having no idea of the effects of caffeine, but delighting in the flavor, I drank the whole pot -- and stayed up all night writing poetry as fast as my pen would go. The three haiku of DEER HUNTER TRILOGY where but three of the couple of dozen poems I wrote that night.

Ina, the Klamath Falls heartbreaker, had introduced me to a number of poetry styles in our brief time together. One that she showed me was poetry written into geometric shapes, like squares, circles and ovals. INT/EXT (11/12/76) was my attempt at a poem in the shape of a circle. In Scientology Int (interior) means having one's spirit, soul, or, as Scientology calls that-which-is-aware-of-being-aware, one's thetan, inside one's body; while Ext (exterior) means having one's thetan exterior to the physical body, or, as New Agers call it, OBE (having an Out of Body Experience). Note the use of an "exterior" point of view in TWO ROMANTIC SCENES written two years later in December '77. In the second line of the "looking at pictures," the pictures referred to are "mental image pictures" a Scientology way of saying memories.

INT/EXT turned out to be the first of my poems to be published in another country. It was published in a Canadian literary journal, called, if I remember correctly, CSP World News. When I received a copy of the issue with INT/EXT, I sent 'em a letter asking where the check was. The editor shot back one of the nastiest letters I have ever received, denouncing me, and any artist that demanded payment for their work, as Whores and Charlatans!

Just three days after writing INT/EXT a major "sea change" came for me. After working/studying 12 to 15 hour a day, six or seven days a week, I was really getting fed up with no personal time. I burned to be a novelist. On the 15th of November, while sitting on the toilet I realized that I would have about 20 minutes free time while there, and asked myself if I could write a complete novel in that 20 minutes. AUTUMN AIR was the answer. It is completely fictional. It was my first successful short story in verse form. I was jazzed. I, again, thought I was on to something. I will let you (and future art critics) decide if I was.

Of course, not all my efforts in this vein were successful. HER SONG and STAR BAR (neither are in the collection) are still under construction. Both are/were an attempt to put sci-fi space travel into verse. Perhaps I should have left well enough alone ...

After eleven months in the ASHO galley I was traded to The Manor Hotel For Scientologists. The Manor was located at Bronson and Franklin, directly below, and about a half mile from, the world famous HOLLYWOOD sign. Next to it was an Advanced Organization (AO) for the Los Angeles area (AOLA), both located about a mile from where I had been bunking (as ASHOF staff) in The Hollywood Inn (The HI) on Sunset Blvd.

The Manor also housed The Guardians Office (GO). It was the GO that was raided by the FBI in 1976. I was there that day ... The GO's purpose was to be the interface between Scientology and those who wanted to destroy Scientology -- or those who Scientology thought wanted to destroy it. This included, the U. S. government in general, the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, Richard Nixon, a cabal of International Bankers & the World Bank, a conspiracy of international Marxist/Communism and Psychiatry, and the "prison guards" from the 28 planet Markabian Confederation!

The Manor had been built in 1928-29 by William Randolf Hearst, the newspaper publishing millionaire who is remembered for his magnificent "Hearst Castle" on the Northern California Coast. It was built as a gift for his girl friend, the movie star Marion Davies. It was an eight- story facsimile of an 18th century Normandy French Chateau. Located in the heart of old Hollywood, it was dedicated as "Chateau Elyse" by Ms. Davies, who operated it as a hotel for movie stars until the 1950s. It was beautiful, but rundown when I got there in late 1976. The thickly landscaped grounds, with a Classical Greek gazebo, bubbling swan fountain and Victorian tennis courts, were breathtaking. I felt like I had fallen into a turn-of-the -century Art Nouveau print by Alphonse Mucha.

After Marion Davies, it was sold to a company that operated it as an old folks home for the wealthy. They built a modern 80 bed hospital unit on the grounds. When Scientology bought it in the early '70s they turned the hospital into the Public Unit of The Advanced Organization of Los Angeles (making the building it had been previously occupying into a staff only unit).

As you may have gathered from the above, Scientology owned a lot of buildings in L. A. There were two OAS. One was for the paying public only, described above, next to the Manor and the other, for staff only, was located in a two story Victorian in the predominantly hispanic area around MacArthur Park. That was the first AO in L. A., set up in that same Victorian back in the '60s. The first uniform of the AO crew, back in the early '60's, was a white jump suit with silver boots and a silver "space" helmet! The Los Angeles Org was located a few doors away from the staff AO, across a major street, in an old rambling spanish style mansion. And the Pacific Area Command Estates Org (PAC Estates), where I served my "boot camp," was just a few blocks away from both of them in a wild gaudy Victorian Mansion build by Charles Chaplain, of silent film fame.

At the other end of Hollywood, beyond The Manor and The HI was Celebrity Centre Los Angeles (CCLA) in a modern three story office building on La Brea Avenue, a block below Hollywood Blvd. CCLA crew had their own berthing "hotel," the Wilcox. Before CCLA bought it The Wilcox had catered to a gay clientele and the place was seriously seedy, painted a pealing and weird bright color that was a cross between fluorescent lavender and tittie pink, and was located in heart of Hollywood's "queer" district on Selma Ave at Wilcox.

My first few months in the Manor were pure hell. Unfortunately for me, The Manor should have had a staff of over two hundred, but under Scientology we were running a full service hotel with just 15 to 30 staff! Talk about make it go right! I got traded from ASHO to The Manor because Something Big was up. This, like practically everything in Scientology was supper hush-hush, need to know only. The SO in fact owned 27 different buildings and was planning to sell them all off and move all the orgs around. Most would be moved into the then vacant, just purchased, old Cedar's of Lebenon Hospital complex on Fountain Avenue, just south and west of Sunset and Vermont.

In SO management one of the principle tools of running the system is a technique called "missions." In this case a mission is a small group of SO members, usually 1 to 5, who have written orders to go into a lower org and perform some function or action. Missions are usually either Observation Missions (Obs Msn), or an Action Mission. Missions are usually refereed to by the number of the written order firing (launching) the mission (everything in Scientology is abbreviated, the abv. for mission is "msn"). Mission 1674 was the msn fired to perform this major event of moving all these orgs without disrupting service or function and sell off all these deadwood properties.

At The Manor there was a staff member named Ron Yoder. Msn 1674 needed him. He was the most knowledgeable person in PAC on the subject of L. A. County building codes. There was a small problem, for me. Yoder, until a few days before the trade had been the Commanding Officer (CO) of the Manor. But just before they traded me, three Manor crew had blown, the SO equivalent of "jumping ship" in the dead of night. All three had been working in the Manor's dining room. The guys at PAC Estates who ran The Manor had busted Yoder from CO to "galley slave!" I was sent to replace him so he could work for Msn 1674 to bring the 27 SO structures up to code so they could be sold. Unfortunately for me, he was doing the work of the three that blew -- which meant that I would be doing the same! I got 45 minutes sleep my first night there. After about a month I had gotten up to a whole 2 hours a night!

After I had been at The Manor a few months I got assigned the position of Lead Steward and assumed a role about that of a Matre de Hotel. There was a closet right off the dining room (that probably was built as a washroom) being used just to store junk. I cleaned it out and made it into a tiny living space.

The GO used to hold secret briefings in the dining room and I inadvertently overheard a few, though unfortunately I heard very little, and remember less. Manor staff were sometimes invited to set in on some of these briefings and I do remember some of them. One topic that same up regularly was "what are the Markabs doing?." According to the GO this planet is part of the Markabian Confederacy, and is operated by the Markabs as a prison planet! One of the Guardians giving the briefings was to become one of the "Scientology 7" from that FBI raid related trail. He said that he had spent many hours in the Library of Congress (doing what I forget) and while so engaged he had noticed the Markabs were doing the same. He insisted that one could easily spot the Markabians as they were wearing bodies grown in culture vats (Hubbard called these "doll bodies") and the vat jobs were never perfect duplicates of humans (most commonly a little too much or too little of something, like excess forehead, or one arm much longer than the other).

It was his opinion that the Markabs were keeping track of life on Earth to determine what sort of intervention would be needed and when, so as to keep things so stirred up on Earth that we'd not be able to stage a "prison break." The GO was very concerned that they might decided to intervene in Scientology, as it had the Tech to undo their "implants" and release the prisoners from this prison planet. But he was confident that we really had nothing to worry about, as the Markabian ??beauracracy?? was so slow, that by the time they decided to act, Scientology would have control of this planet! My poem (A Case Of) WATCHERS SYNDROME is from the point of view of a Markabian observer.

I lived in that little closet for a year or so before finding a bigger room. L. A. by those days had made trash burning illegal. The Chateau Elysse had been built in a much earlier era and had an incinerator in the basement. The incinerator had a little room in front of it for feeding the fire. It was just about twice the size of a cot. Amazingly, the room was empty. I made it my bedroom and finally got some real privacy and sleep. One curious note about this little antechamber to the incinerator... In the 1950's three men had died in that room. They were burning trash and the fire was sucking so much air that the door became vacuum sealed and the three burned up ...

But life at The Manor wasn't all misery. The building and grounds, while extremely rundown, were also very beautiful, and being in contact with some the top people in Scientology, both public and administrative was quite exhilarating. I have dined with Scientology's President Heber Jentze, a former actor who had had a role in the movie PAINT YOUR WAGON, actress Cathy Lee Crosby (she ignored me) and a number of other, less well known Scientology celebrities, such as Manu Topu who won an Academy Award for his performance in the film version of James Mitchner's HAWAII, and Micky McMeel of the kid's TV show CATPAIN KOOL AND THE KONGS, who had also been the last touring drummer with the band THREE DOG NIGHT.

There I socialized with the top o' Scientology's heap, an odd slice of the rich and famous. I chatted regularly with millionaires and movie stars, and their friends and families. This artistic backdrop was incredibly inspirational. In addition to all this physical beauty and intellectual and spiritual communication was Poetry By Candlelight, a weekly poetry event hosted by Scientologist Russell Solomon, a brilliant poet. I attended Poetry By Candlelight nearly every Sunday -- which was conveniently held in the Manor's dining room where I worked.

I developed the habit of writing while waiting to read. Examples of which in this book include BEHOLD THEE, I, IN BEAUTY, written while waiting to read at a poetry event at Celebrity Centre in February '79; FOR INNOCENT EYES ONLY, written at Poetry By Candlelight sometime in 1978; and, THE NIGHT IS STILL JUNG, written at another poetry gathering of Russell Solomon's held at New York George's Hollywood restaurant in 1984. Both of the later being commentaries on what I thought of the poetry of some of the others reading before me. BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A PARADIGM? (8/26/88) was written while waiting to read at a monthly poetry event at an actors theater on Sunset Blvd.

The time I spent at The Manor (from the Fall of '76 to the Spring '79) was the most poetically productive of my life. At the peak of this period I was writing poetry just about every day, sometimes dozens per day. Which is not to say that I wrote every single day of those years. I had a couple of spells where I went for several months without writing a word. I captured what I was feeling during one of those dry periods in ALL IS POETRY.

Scientology is largely about past lives. On the night of December 12, 1976, while waiting for the last of the diners in the Manor's restaurant to clear out, I drifted back in time, remembering a scene from a past life. I wrote up that "memory" as TWO DECEMBER, 1910, which was the date that that event seemed to have occurred on. Similarly, LOOKING BACK (2/12/78, not in this collection) is a short story in verse form about a person who's recovering memory of past lives is making living in the present difficult.

Scientology technology is also long on scales, such as The Emotional Tone Scale, The Admin Scale, and so on. A few days after writing TWO DECEMBER, 1910, I wrote my own SCALE, which was a big hit with Scientologists.

IN THE NIGHT TIDE (2/19/77) is one of the many other fictional poems I wrote during the Manor period. In it I explored the boundary between erotic and aesthetic. I wanted to see how close to the carnal I could get without loosing spiritual beauty. A few days later on the 26th I wrote the first version of a much re-drafted fiction piece, this one exploring American archetypes, CENTERVILLE CITY PARK (On A Sunday). The last stanza was taken from BOOK AND BOTTLE (12/2/76, not in this collection), a poem of mine that I liked a great deal, but it was way too close to Donovan's song RETIRED WRITER IN THE SUN. RAINWALKING, written a week before St. Valentine's Day '78, was written in part to express how I thought dating and relationships ought to be. In January of '79 it occurred to me that "everyone" had written a broken-hearted song/poem and it seemed to me like mine was overdue. SOFT AS THE TINGLE OF (1/21/79) was an exercise in blending fictional story with real emotions.

JOURNEY (from August of 1977) was almost autobiographical, in that I was doing a great deal of cycling during my time at The Manor. It was reported to the crew that L. Ron Hubbard had found that chemicals of all sorts, from environmental toxins and unhealthful food additives to psychedelic drugs, lodged in the body and prevented spiritual gain. A pilot detox program was foisted off on the staff. Most of us were required to run 2 1/2 hours a day. I refused to run and was permitted to ride my bicycle for the required time -- for six or eight months! Usually I rode up and over the top of Mt. Hollywood and/or Cajunga Peak (both in L.A.'s sprawling Griffith Park) twice (once each way) every day. Sometimes I tried to make it to the beach, but it proved too far from Hollywood to Santa Monica to get there and back in 2 1/2 hours.

This exercise did put me in excellent shape. When I left the SO in June of '79 I did so by trying to bicycle my way back to Klamath Falls! I only got as far as Lompoc (about 200 miles), however, before an accident trashed the bike and sent me traveling the rest of the way by Greyhound. JOURNEY kept changing shape and form for years -- too many syllables to be a traditional haiku, its final form alluded me for more than a decade.

In Scientology everyone is rewarded or punished on the basis of their actual production measured by a statistic assigned to measure that production. An organization is measured by its gross income (GI). One week The Manor's GI hit an all time record high. To celebrate this achievement the Flag Banking Officer (the person entrusted by Senior Management at The Flag Land Base to handle an org's funds) sprang for the whole crew (about 30 of us) to go out on the town. We were each treated to two free drinks (!) at the Top Of The Five, the revolving restaurant at the top of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel (seen in the Gil Gerrard BUCK ROGERS movie and the setting for a TV show with Ann Gillian). It just happened that on that same night, September 23, 1977, the Emmy awards ceremony was held at the Bonaventure. I saw many drunken TV celebs dancing and walking around with Emmys clutched to their bosoms. THE EMMY was how I saw them.

One night a few weeks later, a group of us were in a restaurant on Sunset Blvd. There was a drop-dead beautiful girl at the next table. I scribbled "HELLO!" on a napkin and passed it to her. She invited me over and we talked for an hour or so. In the SO one can only have sex with one's spouse, and one can only date other SO members; fraternizing with the public was strictly forbidden. I had not yet met my future ex-wife and was horny as hell. The girl I gave "Hello!" to made it clear that she wanted to go out with me, but I let the monastic rules win and never saw her again.

The Manor, like all Scientology organizations, published its own magazine, MANORMAG. About a month after writing "HELLO" the editor of MANORMAG commissioned me to write YULETIDE for the December issue. It was very well received by the mag's Scientology public, as I recall.

TWO ROMANTIC SCENES was originally part of MATING CALL IN D MINOR (12/3/77), a poem that I gave to SO girls in hopes of getting a date. In fact I did get a couple of dates with it, but nothing that went anywhere romantically.

THE KISS was a moment of forbidden fraternizing. I spent a few hours visiting one of the Manor's guests in her room. Nothing improper happened while I was there, but as I left she kissed me -- with a kiss I still have not forgotten. The Rules forbade me to follow up on her obvious pleasure in my company, so I never saw her after her stay at the Manor.

I met my wife at Poetry By Candlelight in 1978. Each Sunday night the restaurant would be closed and cleaned, then set up for Poetry. The dining area was an oval shaped main room surrounded by French doors that opened out onto a screened-in patio which wrapped around the main hall on three sides. One night I was running late on getting the place cleaned up. I had to mop the patio while the others read. When it came my turn to read I dropped the mop and, somewhat out of breath from the exertion, gave a very breathy reading. A girl in the audience, who was a Manor guest, found my performance way too sexy. She went back to my "cell" (the incinerator antechamber) that night, and basically refused to get out of my bed for the next two weeks! Well, after three years of living by monastic rules (no sex beyond a few chaste kisses) I was hooked. Then she gave me an ultimatum -- marry her or she would never talk to me again!

Knowing that I was breaking the rules by having sex with her, I countered with the proposition that I would marry her if she joined the SO (making us "legal.") I didn't love her, but had the idiotic idea that I had to take responsibility for making her love me. Also, I had a Tennessee Williams play, A SHORT PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT, in the back of my mind and kind of thought that eventually I would come to love her. She joined the SO and we were married just two weeks after I swept her off her feet with that breathy reading of my poetry! No, I did not come to love her; quite the contrary occurred.

We took our annual three weeks of vacation as our Honeymoon in April/May 78. We hitchhiked up the California coast to Klamath Falls. While there I wrote SUNDANCER, and a host of others not included here: TRIBAL GATHERING, RUIN, GOLDEN AFTERNOON, CARROT CAKE, DREAM COME TRUE, PERFECTION, etc.

MY FIRST LIMERICK was one of a number of terrible Limericks written in May '78 in response to a challenge by one of the Manor staff. We had something of a dirty Limerick contest that dragged on for a week or so, with several of us writing or reciting some of the most foul verse ever penned. I have written a few Limericks since, such as this one that I left on a bathroom stall in Mt. Shasta, California:

There was an old mountain named Shasta Who threatened a nat'ral disasta His hot spots grew hotter Than Satan's own daughter When she danced for the boys at Club Cannasta

In 1977 I made what I thought was a most important discovery. In analyzing what poetry was, I came to the conclusion that all poems were made up of three ingredients: first, physical brick-a-brack, real universe objects that the reader can visualize and relate to; secondly, mental universe material, particularly emotions and attitudes; and finally, some heart-felt, deeply held belief that tied the mental and physical together.

Additionally, I realized that I could write poetry about people in much the same way as caricaturists draw "portraits" of people. Since then I have been asking three questions of people, and on the basis of their answers have kicked out a poem portrait of them, or of some image conjured up by their answers, usually in about 5 minutes. The three questions are: 1) name three physical universe objects (three things that exist in the real world); 2) name an emotion; and 3) briefly, tell me something that is real to you (something you believe in). I always use a surpass ending to tie the poem together. I have written literally hundreds of these poems, perhaps even a thousand. I am also a calligrapher, and have occasionally supplemented my income by charging a nominal fee for putting these virtual portraits on parchment.

The first of these "Your Portrait in Poetry in Five Minutes" included here is THE VAGABOND written at Poetry By Candlelight the night of May 30, 1978. After five or six months of using this technique I shared it with the gathering. I passed out pens and paper and had everyone pair up, ask each other my three questions, and write a poem based on the responses. Then I went around the room having each read their poems. Several days later a woman who had never written a poem in her life prior to that night at Poetry By Candlelight, came up and thanked me. By then she had written a dozen poems or so and had discovered, much to her surprise, that she was a poet!

Other poems in this category included here are: THE APPOINTMENT, 1857 (10/12/78); UTAH SUMMER, (2/10/81); BOBBIE, NATASHA, KARLA, and KATHY, all written on a month long Amtrak trip in 1984; (HER NAME WAS) SIRI (from about a month after that trip); PORTRAIT OF A JAZZ FLUTIST (11/6/85); from July of 1987, RICK, and PORTRAIT OF A WAITRESS, FISH LAKE, OREGON; and, the last of these, DIANNE, of 8/8/87.

I still have a few hundred of these in my files. Frankly, most are crap. They are so subjective, and often so oddly stilted because of strange answers given to my three questions, that only the person for whom they were written could like them (and, of course, sometimes not even them).

By late 1977, or early '78, I had amassed so much good material, between these snap answer poems, poetry night scribbles and more serious writing efforts, that I put together my first manuscript of verse, SNAPSHOTS OF A MIND. Jean, a beautiful silver haired elderly lady who was a guest at the Manor typed up the mss.; then Arpie, a gorgeous dark- skinned girl who ate regularly in the dining room with her boyfriend, made copies of it. Unfortunately, like THE ADEPT and RED BOOK RHYME, it never got mailed to a prospective publisher.

Actually, I got discouraged. In researching poetry publishers I couldn't find any that were looking for book length manuscripts. Those that paid at all were vanishingly few. Most paying poetry publishers were magazines who would accept no more than five poems per submission, and all poems had to be 16 lines or less. As you know by now, few of my poems are 16 lines or less, and (by my estimation) none of the really good ones are (except DRY FLY HAIKU, and one or two others, maybe).

In 1972 Orion Sparrowhawk, the sci-fi fan I moved to Klamath with, and I hitch-hiked across half of America. I wrote up one event from that trip in January of 1978 as HELLO MOON. The second stanza was inspired in part by a series of "Hello" poems by Russell Solomon. Around this same time I was getting nostalgic about my time in Klamath. SEASONS depicts an idealized version of how I remembered Klamath.

One day in May '78, while thumbing through a spelling dictionary FROM ILLEGAL TO IMMORTAL literally jumped off the page at me.

EVEN SO EASY (4/4/79) my homage to Dylan Thomas, is the last of the poems in this collection from the Manor years. Don't read it to yourself, say it aloud. It is all about the joy of the sound of the English language.

In June of 1979 my then pregnant wife and I "jumped ship." I returned to Klamath (by bike and bus) were she joined me a few months later (spending the intervening time with my parents in Pomona. I bought a half-interest in a used record store operated by Jim Keith (who, curiously enough, had bought it from Orion Sparrowhawk).

One night Jim and I went to a poetry reading given by a local literary club. We asked If we could read and with a great deal of reluctance they allowed it. Jim and I each scribbled while members of their club read. Jim read before me. His swirling abstract poetry was too weird for the audience. Then I terminally offend them with (A Biker Is Born) PREMATURE? I have had universally poor response to this piece. I have had Scientologists threaten me with bodily harm if I read it again. It seems curious to me that people who believe in past lives have difficulty in dealing with the idea that not everyone who reincarnates is all sweetness and light. Surely if reincarnation is real, the evil ones are just as likely (if not more so) to come back around, no?

I MET YOU IN A DREAM is my longest poem. The second longest was a 425 line short story in verse form submitted to Scientology's Advance! Magazine. It was entitled I AM, OR, THIS IS THE SESSION. Like I MET YOU IN A DREAM, it was assembled largely from previously written material. It interwove the story of a Scientology counselor (called an "auditor," for "one who listens"), his wife, and a person receiving the counseling, or auditing, (such a person is called a "preclear" (PC) as they on are their way to achieving the Scientology mental/spiritual state of "Clear"). The series of auditing sessions took place at the PC's home deep in a forested mountain setting. It was based on a famous painting of an auditor auditing a PC in the woods entitled "This is the Session." The verses of my piece shifted though first person points of view (p.v.) for each of the three people, plus the p.v. of a disembodied spirit (a being in "native" or thetan state) watching it all. SUNDANCER was used to give the disembodied entity a voice.

The editor at Advance! said he thought it was an "excellent piece of work," but rejected it on the grounds that one had to be an Operating Thetan (OT) to submit to them, and, that it was too long. An OT, pronounced Oh Tee, is the highest level of Scientology processing. An OT is described as a being who is able to operate fully as a spirit (thetan) with or without a humanoid body, a state allegedly high above that of mere homo sapien. I disagreed with the length assessment, as I had counted the number of lines in their lead stories and those usually ran a tad over 500 lines; but I was not then (and now never will be) an OT, so what could I do? It is not included here mostly because I don't feel like re-typing the whole damned thing (any more than you feel like reading it, eh?).

I MET YOU IN A DREAM was written on 16 June, 1980, which happened to be Father's Day. My son was about 8 months old and I was sick of my argumentative harpy of a wife. I locked myself in a clothes closet converted into an office (you may be able to detect a pattern there ...) and, dredging through my files, cobbled it together from dozens of poem fragments. Its core structure was a poem called THE BABIES. THE BABIES had been written at The Manor in October '78. It was an attempt at "jazz." I wrote each line, or cluster of lines, on 3 x 5 cards and shuffled the deck before each reading. The chorus, repeated randomly, was the line "the babies," which was said with extreme seriousness, and, sometimes, with just a hint of irony.

In what can only be viewed now as amazing stupidity, my wife and I returned to the SO in Southern California, September, 1980. I was there for three more years, 'till November '83. When I returned, the pilot detox program that I had been bicycling on, had been refined and released to the general public as the Purification Program ("the Purif," for short). The 2 1/2 hours of running had been replaced with 5 hours spent in a sauna. I was required to do the Purif in '81; IN THE SAUNA (A Day On The Purif) (not in this collection) is a snapshot of that time.

Of course, I returned to Poetry By Candlelight. Russell Solomon, who after 15 years of presiding over it was tired and ready to step down. He wanted me to become its emcee, but I declined, giving the official black bow tie to Alan Graham. Alan, an OT, also aspired to be a writer. He had written a poem that I thought most interesting, but difficult to understand. I rewrote it as (A Case Of) WATCHER'S SYNDROME.

SYNDROME is really Alan's story line, with perhaps a little less than half of the words being his. Alan thought it extremely cheeky of me to tamper with his work and never spoke to me again. Some people are so touchy! As mentioned above, according to Scientology this planet is a prison operated by the 28 planet Confederation of Marcab, the piece is from the p.v of a Marcabian observer whose duty is to report any suspicious (potential prison break) activity to the Marcabian overlords -- but the observer is in the process of "going native" and doesn't want to reveal to his bosses that human spiritual technology (Scientology) has evolved to the point where we may soon be able to escape from the Marcabian mind control that keeps us trapped on this terrible little world. Did you get that before reading this? I thought not. And Alan objected to my version because it was too obvious!

DADDY is not really all that good, but, it is real. I was having a lot of trouble keeping to my 'round the clock SO schedule, frantically trying to get my stats up (so as to avoid punishment, rather than to receive some small reward), and to be a father at the same time. I failed miserably at both.

SOLEMN DANCE OF JOY was written in the Spring of '83. It was the last poem in this collection written while I was still in the SO. I am not sure, but I probably wrote it while waiting to read at one of the last Poetry By Candlelights I attended.

I remained in So. Cal. after escaping from the SO the second time. By then my wife and I had separated. She took our son to Portland, Oregon; I moved in with my parents in Pomona. I spent all that winter and the following spring working door-to-door in the Pomona Valley. I quit door-to- door sales in the spring of '84 to get out of the smog and to see America by rail. I spent 30 days in March rolling across the western third of the United States. On that trip I wrote a couple a hundred of the "Your Portrait in Poetry" pieces, selling a few dozen of them to cover beer and food costs. I wrote dozens of other pieces as well, like LOUNGE LIZARDS, a "snap shot" of some of my fellow travelers.

Shortly after I got back I worked for one day at a shopper newspaper called The HIGHLANDER. They weren't real impressed with my self-taught knowledge of publishing. On the way home I dropped into a neighborhood bar. There I met a still very attractive older lady who said she had been a star of the Ice Follies in Europe in the 1930s. I was much taken with her and wrote BORDEAUX BORDELLO as a snapshot of her, sort of.

Even though I was out of the SO it took several more years for me to get of Scientology. I continued to write Scientology inspired pieces for years -- hell! Perhaps I still do. GRANDFATHER'S ENGINES, written the day before my 34th birthday in '84, was such a poem. It, like TEAR, is truly, fully autobiographical. It is exactly what it says it is.

Soon after returning to Pomona from that rail trip I got a job working as an assistant to Tom Hall, an OT who was also a Certified Travel Consultant (CTC). Back around junior high I had wanted to grow up to be a travel agent. It was, therefore, with considerable amazement that I found myself becoming one in 1984. Tom was the Commercial Manager at Ferguson-Gates Travel (FGT) the third oldest travel agency in the U.S.

Tom Hall CTC was surprised to discover that I had never read any e.e. cummings. Tom, a fan of my poetry, was sure several of my poems had been inspired by cummings. He gave me a book of cummings poetry and it blew my mind. A few days after reading cummings for the first time I wrote SPECTACLES on August 21, 1984, in obvious imitation of his poem from the p.v. of several hats. Curiously, Tom was not the only fan of mine who had noted a cummings-like quality to my work, long before I had read any.

WORLDS IN THE MORNING was written on the bus, on my hour-long commute from Pomona to FGT in Mid-Wilshire, on the First of October in 1984. I included it here mostly because I like the chorus. Similarly, SKIING THE SLOPES OF YOUR KILIMANJARO HEART was a snapshot of one of my fellow commuters written a year or so later. The title of WORLDS is from a conversation between Tom and a client. One day in the office I overheard Tom on the phone helping someone book a trip to the Orient. While discussing which airlines left when, he mentioned the CIA owned World Airlines, saying "World's in the morning" -- which I thought a great line.

Frankly, I remember nothing about how DRY FLY HAIKU came about, which is a shame, as it is possibly my best haiku, and certainly my favorite. SONG OF THE OCULIST also draws a blank. Clearly it was stitched together from bits and pieces out of my files. It may have been cobbled together on one of my long bus rides in or out of L.A., or while waiting to read somewhere, which I was doing a lot of. KANSAS CITY BLACKOUT is a total mystery. I found it, untitled, one day in my notebook. It was in my handwriting so I guess I wrote it. Since I couldn't remember anything about it I named it BLACKOUT. COMMERCIAL (A Drunken Ditty) is another head-scratcher. I have to think that I was drunk when I wrote it ... Likewise, the origins of KITTEN are long since forgotten.

As a travel agent I did a lot of traveling, mostly for free. One day I was given a free familiarization (fam) trip on the Amtrak for the inaugural run of new expanded service on their Southwest Chief from L.A. to Chicago via the southwest. I jumped at the chance, but I did not have enough time to go all the way to Chicago, so I turned around in Garden City, Kansas. SNAPSHOT OF NEW MEXICO is just that, what I saw and heard on that trip while passing through New Mexico. Like JOURNEY it took years, and four or more radically different drafts, before finding its current form. A couple of times I used my free travel bennies to visit friends in Klamath Falls and do some camping and hiking in the Cascade Mountains of Southern Oregon. One such trip was in July of '87 when I wrote the portraits RICK and PORTRAIT OF A WAITRESS, FISH LAKE, OREGON as well as the poem THE TASTE OF A TOWN.

RENDERING FROM A SUMERIAN CLAY TABLET SHARD (11 Nov 87) is one of my all time favorite poems (of mine). I had been studying the ancient Middle East and reading Sumarian poetry for several weeks before writing it. Sumer is the oldest civilization known to Western Science. Sumer flowered and fell, over a thousand years before the birth of Babylon, in the same general region. The Sumerians, god bless 'em, never invented rhyming poetry. Theirs was a verse form based on rhymic repeats. One day on the morning commute to FGT I found a Sumerian poem struggling to come out of me. I only got three stanzas written before arriving in Mid- Wilshire, just a small piece of what I envisioned the poem to be, hence the SHARD part of the title.

Around "the Holidays" in 1983 a poetry reading at Clairmont College prompted the creation of my second attempt at a poetry chapbook. I read in the local paper that a number of famous poets would soon be reading at the college. My inquiries to the English Department revealed that only poets who had been published in book form would be allowed to read. So I desktop published a dozen copies of a 20 (or so) page chapbook, SOMETHING FOR MY FANS THIS SUMMER, that weekend at my local instant print shop. Of course it wasn't good enough for those snooty University-types. About six months later some copier company left a brand new, big ass copier at FGT, with cases of paper, on trial inspection. FGT management didn't want it, so I used it for a week to produce a couple a hundred copies of a 74 pagAfterword

I considered making this a FOREWORD, but I decided th

Jim Keith, who would become a best-selling Conspiracy and UFO writer before his untimely death in 1999, moved to Reno, Nevada, while I was working at FGT. During the period that we had the record store together we also started writing together. When I returned to the SO we continued to critique each other's work. Before I left the SO we began work coauthoring the still unfinished sci-fi book, STAR JACK, under the pen name Michael Drax. All together we were probably working on more than 20 joint projects by 1988. During my FGT years I used a lot of my free travel bennies to go to Reno to discuss writing projects with him. Eventually our writing team would see print with 30 or more porno novels, as well a half-dozen sci-fi shorts, "Fool's Gold" a sci-fi serial in a local newspaper, and numerous non-fiction projects.

In 1988 I moved to Reno. I am not afraid of flying, it just bores the snot out of me. I much prefer Amtrak where one can roam about, pick up dames and get plowed in the bar car. But, at a mere 500 miles per day, its too slow for anything but sightseeing. After one too many stand-by flights sandwiched between a fat woman and a business man, I gave up and moved to Reno. Initially I really loved Reno as a wild and crazy party town. The novelty wore off quickly, however. The honeymoon was over by the spring of 1989 when I wrote RENO. Oddly enough, Reno (unlike my ex-wife) has grown on me over the years.

In 1992 I started the National UFO Museum, taking on the role of Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief of it's quarterly journal, NOTES FROM THE HANGAR. That pretty much threw me full time into non-fiction writing and researching UFO, political and Conspiracy Theory issues. In 1996, while working on my first (and as yet unpublished) non-fiction book TOPPLING THE PYRAMID: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO OVERTHROWING THE NEW WORLD ORDER, I wrote the poem NEW WORLD DISORDER.

From 1988 to 1998 Jim Keith and I did another zine together, DHARMA COMBAT. One night after an all night paste- up and printing session at a local Kinko's Print Shop we stepped out into the dawn, were a trick of light made it look like a tank was parked under the trees a few blocks up the street. I was stoned and it frightened me rather badly. TANKS ARE INTIMIDATING was written a day or two later. I remember little about CONTRA BAND and POMONA other than that they were written around the same time period, and that I was stoned when I wrote 'em. (No, I have never attended the NASCAR Winter Nationals held each year in Pomona.)

(A Question Of) DEFINITION (9/13/96) is the most recent piece in this collection. I sent an earlier version of this book to an old friend. His critique of it pissed me off. This was my response. I never sent this poem to him though, because I did not wish to offend. Bruce, I hope you're not too offended now ... And frankly, I'm probably all wet. Poetry probably is a way to say the unsayable. Maybe its a left brain, right brain thing. Poetry and prose, at least for me, seem to come from very different parts of my consciousness.

Since leaving the Manor it has been increasingly difficult for me to write poetry. Its more a case of inspiration than perspiration, 'cause the harder I try to force a poem out, the less likely it is to come. Poetry, the shyest Muse, cannot be summoned, only invited. She comes when it suites her. But I do know a few ways to entice her. She likes to party, particularly with Cupid's victims. Also, I think she hates to be the only Muse at the party -- Music particularly draws her out.

Here then are seventy-odd times I have danced with this timid Muse. Drop me a line and tell me what you think December 3, 1999 Sparks, NV.

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