PaperScreams.com was condemned to the ether-trash a little while ago.  I have uploaded the last backup from March 25th of 2009.  All poetry is on LAH now as well as whatever postings were on PS.  It’s organized by dates of original posts.  Poetry is still sorted as was on PS (category/book).  Many of the images were lost because of dropped links (outside the home site) and I’ll fix those as we go along.  Some may not come back.

NOTE:  My work in Paper Screams spans about 20 years of my life and there is material that is not suitable for youn-uns (primarily in the Sunrise department).  I have made efforts to notify readers of sensitive material in such cases.  You’ll see them with the headline

“This poem is classified DRUNEO for Don’t Read Unless Not Easily Offended.”

(Notify me immediately if I’ve missed one)

There are NO instances of inappropriate imagery or other media on the site.

If you’re interested in the history or what remains of a timeline of the poetry of Paper Screams, there is some that I can jot down here in addition to the notes sporadically added to the posts containing the poems themselves.

The first work, that which started the flow, was The Black Knight, which I wrote when I was about 16. A friend of mine, Rodney, in Virginia introduced me to heavy metal and there was a group called Leather Wolf that did an instrumental called The Black Knight. I was inspired and attempted to write a story in verse that corresponded to the music. It survived on paper and even got published in my senior-high rag. Since the first poem, I’ve sporadically written all the others, a few inspired by music, some by religion, many by my wiccan experiences and finally, a growing number, by my relationship to the Most High God to whom I was most graced to give my life in August of 2003.

There is a definite progression in the qualities and content of the poems. I’m convinced that my ability to write cryptic work has greatly improved at the same time as my imagery. Later poems, those written while I was in Cuba, for instance, are really intense for me to read even today. Poetry for me is, however, more a creative process than deliberate and, just as a painter will often say, I set out to create and the path I followed led me nowhere I’d imagined to go. The words flow from the pen and when they’re done, the real work I do is cleanup.

An ongoing project is to reach back through Paper Screams and date or provide background on the poetry, hopefully to make it tangible in relation to my life as it progressed. If I could have one wish, it would be that I had recorded along with each poem a few details of the setting in which I wrote, the date and a few details to help me remember what was going on at the time. I remember a few very vividly and some at least have shadows that linger in my mind; and as I go along through the work I think I can bring back a lot of it.