I am happy to report that my career as an author began with poetry and songwriting. My first published item, back in 1987, was a poem. I wrote a few short stories here and there as a teenager, and began writing poetry in 1982. I focused almost exclusively on this until 1985, when I began writing songs on the guitar. In late 2005, I bought a bouzouki and began writing songs with that instrument.
Some of my early poems are here:
http://www.alignment2012.com/selected.htm
Readings of my poems:
Center (1983)
True Nature Flashing Forth (2003)
Ode to Abzu (2006)
Tryptagonal poems from The 2012 Story (2009)
Some of my song lyrics are here:
http://www.alignment2012.com/songs.htm
Recordings of a few guitar songs (quality varies):
Her Name (2008)
Power of Love (1992)
Center (1994, from the 1983 poem)
Sailor’s Dream (1990)
Recordings of a few bouzouki songs:
This is What I’ll Do (2010)
Commiseration (2009)
What Will Be Will Be (2010)
Poetry Collections:
My first collection was Metaphysical Speculations (1984), update in 1990, and then added to periodically. It is a single, thick, spiral bound book.
Amness was a notebook from 1982-1983 that I transcribed and printed three copies of in 1996
Twenty-One Poems was a collection produced in three copies in 1999, with two early short stories appended at the end.
Selections to Forty is a booklet collection of poems printed in 2004 and I sold or gave away ten or so copies at a book fair in Denver.
Momentary Scintilla and Collected Others. This is an archive of all (or most) poems collected and transcribed from various notebooks. The digital archive file is complete through 2008 or so, including some early Tryptagonal poems.
Tryptagonals:
In 20o5 I began writing six-line poem-nuggets having a specific rhyme structure. I called them Tryptagonal Hexameter sonnets, or simply Tryptagonals (pronounced like diagonal, emphasis on the second syllable). This creative enterprise was an outpouring of returning to writing as a fun enterprise. I immediately saw how I could craft quasi-historical back stories the the sequences of Tryptagonals I was writing. The first book of Tryptagonals and back stories was completed by July 2005, titled Sonnets from the Sands. Several copies were donated to the Theosophical Library in Seattle. I gave many away. This was followed by From the Wanderer’s Notebooks (2007) and The Dynasty of the Ink Blood (2010). I periodically returned to and nurtured this creative work, and have the poems and back stories largely completed for four additional volumes in the series. It is a seven-volume interrelated mythos, a Tryptagonal Heptalogue. Poem sequences will be hand printed using letterpress equipment. For more information on Tryptagonals, see: http://www.alignment2012.com/Tryptagonals.html