If your stomach is sufficiently strong, and you're a little bit numb to cruelty and horror, you might be ready for the heart-wrenching lines of R. Paul Craig. With the three poems he presents here, he takes us through the gamut of pain: exploring abuse, corpses, alcoholism, and all the other symbols that make up agony. Vicious and biting, his poems exhaust while they inspire.
Paul says, "I teach Philosophy at San Jacinto College, near Houston. I have previously published poetry in Poetic Diversity, Poet Lore, 2River View and Red River Journal, among others. I live in Friendswood, Texas with my wife, two children and a little dog. I bounce back and forth between the view that words, concepts, are meaningless. Almost a kind of logical positivism. They are meaningless because they are made up, all we got, perhaps, the only way to say certain things, like love or god. Then I go to the other side and think that words, concepts, are marvelous, appealing, sexual ever, like something going beyond what can even be said. Words, concepts, point toward, never realize what is there, do not denote or connote. The Dictionary is wrong. Maybe all we have are words, and without them we would be poorer, crazier, less than. So I have this ambiguous relationship with words, concepts. Almost a love-hate thing. Poetry is not about words, to me, although it uses words, concepts, among other things. Poetry is about images, metaphors, which go beyond the real (intellectually) to the place of feelings. With poetry maybe I can not say, but I can be, be me, and feel what I want or need to. Thank you for letting me express this." Drop him a line at toocool62@aol.com.
Paul's works here at Unlikely Stories are:
2004:
The Person
Dad
The Leap