A message to my readers:

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Greetings wanderers of the poetic abyss!

You have traveled far and wide, through the vast wastelands of poetry. On occasion you have stopped to take in your surroundings. Often they were bleak with thoughtlessness and bland with conformity. But, here and there, you found comfort and solace in the poetic landscape. I hope that this humble webpage can be for you an oasis in the desert of poetry. However, I fear that for some, it may only appear as a mirage.

To all who travel here... OHM-MANI-PADMI-HUM
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Favorite Quotes:

"There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays), it is demonstrably inefficient and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude."

-Aldous Huxley

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?"

-Mahatma Gandhi

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

-E. E. Cummings

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

-Aristotle

"There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance... I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance."

-Socrates

"When you say, 'I can't comprehend it,' it's because the thinking mechanism you have works with time- so time and space are the matrices against which you think. The predicament of dimensions which are not linear- not linear time or linear space- where here and now are both here, and now and then are both now- those are ones we can't think about."

-Ram Dass

"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing. "

-Albert Einstein

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."

-Mark Twain

A bit about me:

Age: 23

Sex: Male

Location: Somewhere deep in the bowels of the Globalist Empire

Hobbies: Music. More music. Lots and lots of music. Get the point? I teach choir and guitar at a junior high, I play in a band, and I'm the music director at a church. And in my spare time I teach music lessons privately. Yeah, my plate is pretty full, but I like it that way.

Favorite Artists:

Writers: Orson Scott Card, Aldous Huxley, E.E. Cummings, Carl Jung, H.P. Blavotsky, Robert Frost, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Ayn Rand, and of course Shakespeare.

Musicians: Led Zeppelin, Traffic, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Velvet Underground, Violent Femmes, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, Phish, Pink Floyd, Medeski Martin and Wood, Carl Denson’s Tiny Universe, Polyphonic Spree, Ben Harper, Jeff Buckley, Thievery Corporation, Johnny Lee Hooker, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis... the list could go on forever.

Visual Artists: Salvador Dali, Christian Coigny, M.C. Escher, Vincent Van Gough, Claude Monet, any of the impressionists, Norman Rockwell, and of course who couldn't love Bob Ross?

Religion: I don’t really see the need to put a label on my spirituality. I am certainly not the guy who says he’s an “atheist” so he can write off his unethical and unproductive behavior as perfectly acceptable. Those people are only making it harder on themselves. I was, however, raised in a very religious home and found that to be rather smothering of my spiritual development. So, as Buddha suggests, I found the middle way. If someone absolutely has to know what “religion” I affiliate myself with I usually tell them that I am a Theosophist, but this almost always leaves them with more questions than they started with. I won’t bore you here with all my religious ponderings, but if you’d like to know more you can always e-mail me, or read my poetry... my understanding of the universe is pretty well documented in my poems.

Well, I guess that should give you some idea as to what I’m all about. Please feel free to post any suggestions or comments in your reviews, or write me at:

bernard_marx_33@

ENJOY!!