I think about a world to come where the books were found by the golden ones, written in pain, written in awe by a puzzled man who questioned, "What are we here for?" All the strangers came today and it looks as though they're here to stay.

-David Bowie "Oh! You Pretty Things"

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Publication History: Achala Nabhastala (Unmoving Sky)

This is a particularly embarrassing inclusion in my publication history.

First, I am not a poet. I do not like to write poetry. When it comes to me writing poetry, I don't think there is any way to do it well. What convinced me that I should attempt to be a published poet, I will never know. It probably had a lot to do with being a moody teenager.

Second, I am fairly certain that I simply listened to the Pink Floyd song "Echoes" from the album Meddle. For the title, I was hoping to find something that sounded profound, so I used an on-line translator to change simple English words into exotic words from other languages. "Achala Nabhastala" is a really bad translation of the words "Unmoving Sky" into sanskrit using such a shady method.

Finally, this was published in a compilation of poems by The International Library of Poetry titled The Layers of Our Souls. If any of you have ever encountered The International Library of Poetry in your time, then you know that they will and do publish anything and everything. They do this in order to get those who have been published to buy their hard-cover anthologies. My family bought two copies of The Layers of Our Souls to celebrate my publication, but when I first opened my personal copy I noticed that regardless of how terrible my own poem was, nearly everything else in the anthology was even worse.

Because it couldn't possibly make you as sick to your stomach as it has made me, its author, I present to you "Achala Nabhastala (Unmoving Sky)" from The Layers of Our Souls (ISBN 0-7951-5055-5).

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