Poetry from the Universal Mind

I became intrigued by the universal mind or universal consciousness while reading “Finnegans Wake,” which doesn’t refer to a funeral but rather says the Finnegans are waking up. I wondered, what the heck is Joyce doing? I had been noticing the startling personal relevancies and realized that they were there for everyone. He was expressing the consciousness that connects all humanity, showing that separations by race, age, gender, social class and other things are artificial, that people are much closer to one another than we typically understand. I decided to try it in poetry and this is the result. The universal mind was not what I expected. It is a great rush of language and images that are at once profound and absurd. There is a lot of irony and humor, but it has a somewhat dark undertone. It is because of their novelty that the poems may seem abstruse. Each one of the fifty-three has a simple idea or two. For example, “Nightfall burns the Grand Panjandrum’s nose hair” suggests that the passage of time discombobulates even the most grandiose among us. Thank you for reading my collection. I hope you like it.