Since the rise of the warrior city-states, the controlling bureaucracies have exerted a trenchant power over the populations within their purview. An artificially divided strata arose from this world view, and a "demand for menial labor" became paramount. Under such an auspices a select few were automatically absolved of the ulterior puzzle of day-to-day sustainment. But for the vast majority the issue of hunger and general dearth has maintained itself as the mantra of a negative epic. And it is within this epic that the majority of the populace in the West has been born.

From the 1760s onward a working class has evolved from the industrial epoch. A class, worked to its teeth in order to maintain a modicum of raiment and shelter. And it is this latter condition into which I was born, always near the margins, at times, only an eyelash from penury.

But as an artist, a poet, one does not have to curtail one's power in order to evoke the suffering which comes from material deficiency. Inner radiance cannot be curtailed by the stones one has to sup with one's bread. One can look at Rimbaud or Blake, at Cesaire or Bob Kaufman, to see that the mind cannot be contained within the provinces of hunger. And this is not to say that the reality of poverty has no life in letters, or that the imagination is elitist. By no means. But what I speak of is the imaginal power to leap beyond the brutally imposed confines to combat the bureaucracies with an elemental seismics, with a new and alien thinking.