SOME NOTES ON THESE POEMS This collection is in many ways a follow-up to my "Arise, Misanthrope, Take Stand Against The Race" book which came out in mid-1981. The poems here pick up from where that collection ended, covering selections from the second half of 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, and through June 1985 when everything fell apart, my drinking stopped, and my Muse was silenced for nearly a year.
The present volume is a long time in coming, due in large part to the greater output of material that I was generating in the years represented. I sometimes find it hard to separate myself sufficiently from the poems to be able to edit with a truly objective eye, and so the task kept being put farther off into the future. I had hoped that the mass of the "editing" for this book would have been done by those dozen or so people who receive "folio" collections of my poems at the end of most years, but no response ever returned to my requests for this effort.
I hope that I have succeeded in pulling together a collection that represents the best of these years. The poems are arranged in the order of their composition to give a sense of their times and that downward spiral of life which is always leading "Into The Dark".
- B.M.T., 1987
