This volume is dedicated,

as is the author,

to a sunshine child

and a daisy-strewn street

Alone and alive I sit

in the high, darling morning –

with naught on my mind

but love and the heart of an angel

in butterflown garb.

pmb

This volume is, incredibly, as insane as the last. It is dedicated again to a close one who has helped.

To any who would dubiously read this truth, again, it is meant only for me – it cannot be understood. I have lived little more than a year since the beginning of my first and second volumes. I have gained much but I have not recorded it. Much of this volume I fear will be taken with reminiscence (nostalgia is my style), but it will still record immediate incidences and thoughts and metaphor.

This volume will have plans that it will fail and will achieve unforeseeable success beyond aspiration. This volume is like the others – it is a continuum as is my life. I cannot foretell, but I will hope for its betterment and mine through it. This volume will be different than the others as I have grown wiser and realize many more of my different, delicate ways.

The helping to which this large volume is given is different from that which Israel gave, for Israel was a guide to maturity. Rosemary asks that I guide her, and matures me all the more, while winning my heart with gratefulness and leaving me in the door.

On the evening,

in the heyday morning

there gelled upon her cheer,

a calm –

a gayly tranquil mood

beguiling me

to the pleasure of

her companionship.

Such are the pains and pleasures of my sad fancies and young loves. Such are the pleasures of love and the pains of a sad fancy’s patience.

In the years when I was early,

dancing my swan edged tunes

past hearts

and helping hands

to the ultimate pattern

of a one-lover mind,

the terms of their

starry-smocked sunset seas

kept me peacefully alive

and waking –

lingering toward an unmet goal.

With those, the last puzzles of this foreword, I greet you in the guise of Patrick McKeithan Blue. I welcome you to another harvest in one volume.

Patrick McKeithan Blue

Monday morning late, and early – Liz wouldn't move (too cold). With three well wishing, wishing well worshippers whispering between the passing lips of the pipe holding it in. I traveled the eleven elven miles to town to lose the bus.

I found another lonely bus and settled in to read Steve’s new book. I can’t disagree more with his decision not to publish. He is a genius with feeling that makes his worst seem brilliant. Ah, but he is proud – rightfully.

The bus ever awkwardly narrowly misses signs and trees on its right by inches and makes me thankful for a bigoted, experienced driver.

The bus lurched to a halt at its destination and Patrick Blue shoved his journal and pen back into his satchel – his “handbag” as his father had referred to it during high school, when Patrick would not be parted with the bag which held his writing materials and camera. Little had changed since then. Patrick had not, of course, ever given up his satchel.

He slung it over his shoulder and pulled himself up from the cold bus seat. The frozen light that had burned mute through the glass of the bus windows turned to a full flame as he stepped down onto the pavement. The thin covering of ice and snow crunched beneath his feet. He patted his satchel against his side, smiling to think of the stack of hand-lettered fliers it contained. His first stop was one block up from the bus stop, a local coffee shop of the sort that was fast dying out. It had the feel of self-sustainability and the nutty aroma of fresh brew wafting through the, albeit, somewhat smoky air. Most everyone smoked, even in coffee shops. Patrick would have one himself, on occasion, but tried not to make a habit of it. He suspected that shit could kill you.

Patrick Blue was not a tall man but he wasn’t quite a short man either. He existed somewhere in between, quite rightly labeled in “average.” The word applied to most other things about him as well, such as his charms, his good sense, his sex appeal and his writings. Nonetheless, he was industrious in his devotion to his writings, in particular, in a manner that quite transcended the aforementioned label, and this kept him in good sorts. In addition to his rather average personality, Patrick was possessed of rather average thinning hair, trimmed in an average manner, with a mustache much the same, though he felt it made him look older than his nineteen years. His round glasses were known by his friends as his "windshields." 

His voice was soft as he asked the clerk of the shop if he could post a flier for a new literary association he was starting. She gave him a dimpled smile in return and assured him that all book clubs and writing groups were fine. Then she lent him a roll of tape and pointed to a free corner of the shop window.

As he smoothed the flier to the window, the glass cool against his palms, he read it again to himself from memory. “Looking for Literary Types,” it read, “Must appreciate poetry and the abstract. Looking to create a group of like-minded writers. First meeting held in the old Howard building basement on Third St, next Saturday, at 5 pm sharp.”

Liz had followed up each of Patrick’s carefully lettered advertisements with a comical, half-drawn figure reading a book and wearing a hat that covered his eyes. Liz was not the finest artist that Patrick knew, nor was Patrick the finest calligrapher that he knew, but they weren’t starting an arts club, after all.

Patrick and Liz lived in a small, rundown house with Patrick’s mother. It was perched on the hill above their college campus, which was not at all as convenient as it might seem when one considered the trek down to campus for class and then back up again afterwards. Neither Liz nor Patrick had a car, and the hike was worse in the winter, so the best option was to catch the bus, if you could. If not, you were in a foul mood by the time you got to campus and in an even fouler mood by the time class ended. All this, to say nothing of when you had to go to work. Patrick worked in the English department as a teacher's assistant. He had already plastered his fliers all over the department yesterday between classes.

Patrick was, at this point in his life, somewhat settled in. This disturbed him. For instance, he was happy living with his mother and looking after her, but he had always harbored the belief that he would one day travel Europe, during which travels he would sharpen his skills as a writer. Furthermore, he was content with his lady friend, Liz, who lived with him in his mother's house and did the dishes and sometimes made beef curry for dinner and sometimes brought home takeout Chinese food. She was not, however, his intellectual equal and she did not challenge him in any manner, excepting that she sometimes tried his nerves. He was sure that he'd been quite specific in his youth with his goal to marry a beautiful woman who wrote in the style of Virginia Woolf and had long, blonde curls. Liz wrote in the style of a slapstick comedian with a surplus of coconut pies to toss at the reader, and her hair was straight and bushy and light brown, with even bangs across her forehead. All in all, he was a victim of a great compromise.