It is not because of you i search out strange alleyways. nor in your stead am i drawn       to the city's sagging industrial abscesses.       it is all a crumpled latticework of human emotion i would seek to hang my hat upon ---excerpted from my poem "Bella". I love forgotten spaces: the cracks where I think dreams seep into our world and like the green of grass through a sidewalk, inspire us. These things themselves are varied and wonderful subjects for writing, as are their effects. I guess my task as a person who cares about them is to render them such that they can be shared with others. Three poems Harvesters In dreamtime, they speckle the muddy steppes- burnished steel puppets gone to rust under years of wind. Here, these mischromosomed children obscure the songlines, breaking the soil, once ceaseless, with repetition. Tarpaulins flap and jag atop their shoulders each its own, shifting, polychromatic scarf or wing, while the shaft keeping time for the pumps is thick and silent. They cannot harvest here, among the softly slumbering intelligence of symbols, once peopled by outsized beasts of enigmatic origin, whose huge eyes like deep wells touched the water table of our souls. Mid-August The heart wanders the rape-seed as it yellows, Hungry ghosting the half-lit fields of mid-dawn. It is August and far away Ohio ripens, calling the mind and its projections across two months, drawing thought out of the dark-shrouded shed- smelling of degreaser and old steel digesting itself with rust. There is a spiraling, a stringing of place atop place, boring a hole so that in one as the other, the heat is light- Aurora rises wavelike above the swamp, slower than the cloud of mosquitoes. It flashes and flares, molding silhouettes out of trunks stripped bare and left to suffocate in water. Song for Daedalus Slick winged like Icarus, falling. The night is mid-way soured -- thick and dark. And out in the fog you can hear Daedalus calling marco Marco His breath become a whisper by morning. Gone with the years, he is still staring the sun down, eyes glazed white as milk skin. Marco. From the shore, above the cliffs, by the sea. A silent admonition- mon coeur petit coeur mon oeil mes yeux. I am the poet. Untouched by the sightless. I am speaking to you father, Your sons, undone by your quests, bear them. WE are your folly Your Polo, and its blood-raw requiem.

Bio JohnPaul started writing poetry when he was quite young, finding it a refuge of beauty and freedom far from the accepted rules of grammar. Since then he has made friends with both grammar and the more constrictive aspects of verse. He is currently pursuing a career in integrative medicine and while he loves the healing arts, he looks forward to having more time to write.

Funding for metroblossom is provided in part through the generous support of The University of Chicago Arts Planning Council and Class of 2001 Gift's Student Fine Arts Fund.