Shelley famously observed long ago and far away that poetry is the language of the imagination. This authors experience with it has been that it is more the expression of the spontaneous celebration of being alive, far beyond just the joys of living. Over and above what is conceivable, the delicious agony and poignant ecstasy of the tangible here and now constitute a compelling impetus for poetical indulgent escapades. The turmoil of the soul itself, in the entirety of its manifold dimensions and levels of complexity, is the proper province of poetry. Showcased in this books pages are the unadulterated relics of the struggle of the authors soul to stay whole, afloat and above the corrosive vortex of the ruins of time. Bereft of elegance the verses may be, they are nonetheless the embodiment of the struggle of a soul in search of a justifiable and sustainable meaning for being. The collection includes every title committed into writing which could be salvaged from the ravages of aging. This dates as far back as 1961 when the author was the editor-in-chief of the high school magazine, The Cub Farmer. More titles were written but fell by the wayside. Thanks mostly to electronic storage with the advent of word processing technology, retrieval has mostly been facilitated. All of the titles have been posted at the online venue AllPoetry.com of which the author had been a member over the last thirty months or so. More than half of the titles were minted with the nom de plume byline Ace Lilacs. This was attendant to the venues limiting the author character string length to thirteen, truncating the full name to a rather awkward Constancio Su.
