I've always been drawn to poetic things.  I tried to compose poetry as a kid, but my mind was constantly filled with other people's words.  My lame attempts were just recycling Neil Young,  Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison. My greatest passion was photography.  My primary influences were its most poetic practitioners: Kertéz, Brassaï, Atget, Robert Frank, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

     After I turned 30, I found my voice, and began to sustain photographic work in series, rather than individual "poems."   My major turning point was a project that I called Invisible Light.  It took over three years of hanging out in bars to capture the surfeit of joy that shines like an invisible light from people under the influence of music.   To do this unobtrusively, I used an invisible infrared strobe.

      Eventually, I realized that I didn't need the trick at all.   I could be there with a regular visible light strobe and get the same sort of images.   Somewhere along the line I changed.  Instead of mirth, all I seemed to photograph was melancholy.   My life blew up, or, more accurately, I burned it down.  I tried to keep working, but I soon realized that I was frightened of the darkness all around me.  I stopped making photographs.   I began to write instead. The last major group of photographs I produced was called:

     I went back to school, and started to seriously study literature.   I found lots of dead friends.  A weird epiphany occurred when I realized that I had unknowingly inverted a popular phrase from Milton that I read as a child.  Oh well, Milton was a bit famous for inverting syntax himself.  The deeper I bury myself into poetry as a way of understanding life, the more I find these words from Wordsworth true:

With the young, of both sexes, Poetry is, like love, a passion; but for much the greater part of those who have been proud of its power over their minds, a necessity soon arises of breaking the pleasing bondage, or it relaxes of itself;— the thoughts being occupied in domestic cares, or the time engrossed by business. Poetry then becomes only an occasional recreation; while to those whose existence passes away in a course of fashionable pleasure it is a species of luxurious amusement— In the middle and declining age, a scattered number of serious persons resort to poetry, as to religion, for protection against the pressure of trivial employments, and as a consolation for the afflictions of life. And lastly, there are many, who, having been enamored of this art, in their youth, have found leisure after their youth was spent, to cultivate general literature; in which poetry has continued to be comprehended as a study.

Essay Supplemental to the Preface, (1815)

      I have been through most of these phases; though I don't write poetry, I find its study rewarding.  I turned from photography to prose writing, just to find some vent for the "spontaneous overflow of feelings."  Many of those feelings are melancholic these days.  Welcome to my mossy cell.   No, you haven't stumbled onto some Satanic cult.  Maybe just a cult of poetry.