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).

What Is A Poet?

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music. His fate is like that of those unfortunates who were slowly tortured by a gentle fire in Phalaris's bull; their cries could not reach the tyrant's ears to cause him dismay, to him they sounded like sweet music. And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.'

- Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

Flowers to the Wild Weeds

Stones bloomed with red carnations, reptiles swelled in size

the sun descended like a lord dressed in gold robes

holding his earth-wife in his arms dressed with the moon,

and passed out wings for worms, and flowers to the wild weeds.

- Nikos Kazantzakis, Odyssey: A Modern Sequel