Chapter 1 

ENDING----change the number and then have it connected to the first or title page.

She was not a Muse but a succubus who I had never imagined existed in this life. Fascinating as she was to be around I felt my hard-won youth vanish under her spell, her constant conjurations of the dark mind to prove that I was crazier than she was. I would go and disappear into the daylight ashamed that I had the freedom I had and winding up in libraries reading heavy books to convince myself that I was useful for something. I didn't want to return to the crazy woman. I saw her everywhere. It seemed as though her very purpose was to upwell in me the worst sort of emotions, the worst conclusions about life, and the most pessimistic forebodings about the future.

Then she would play her Rachmaninoff or force me to read Thomas Mann and then make a wonderful stroganoff for dinner and I was back between her claws.

"This woman has destroyed my poetry," I thought to myself as I quickly gathered all my things. "She has taken every shred of imagination and made it into a weapon to use against me."

I left her that night. I got into what was left of my car and drove. I drove like a monk who dreams he is floating in air because he has ecstatic feelings. It was persistent and believed in itself but I wanted to get away. I wanted to shed a skin or two and go to a less vexatious place.

I heard the distinctive voice say, "It's not what you wrote but what compelled you to write. It was the models of who taught you to write, to think, and to know the spiritual."

David Eide
January 24, 2014