Thomas Simmons

People lie all the time. But bodies are capable of sharing unspoken truths with one other, and words are capable of sharing otherwise-unsharable truth. Traumatized repeatedly early in life, a child grown into adulthood may find the world inexplicable and overwhelming, full of the contradictions of death-in-life; of the power-hungry pretending to be wise; and of the wise in necessary retreat. For me, from about the age of eight, words in the form of poems became the one bridge between the lies that surrounded me and the substance of some reality that was there but that I could not see: a child rendered blind by the promise of life eternal.

I have been chastised for writing cerebral poetry, for failing to come down to the trash and filth of mortal existence. That is untrue, although I understand where the criticism comes from. If in my poems my method is often oblique rather than in-your-face, it is the human body that drives that method, that same human body through which I will get to where we all eventually go.

Unvaccinated because of my parents' Christian Science religion, I had every childhood disease--measles, mumps, chicken pox, whooping cough--and because of this was diagnosed much later, in adulthood, with a significantly-compromised auto-immune system. At eight I had pneumonia for almost four weeks, with no food for three weeks and no water for 84 hours. . .I weighed 49 pounds. I remember fading in and out of consciousness, and I liked not being conscious and was sorry to find myself returning to it, famished and in pain. In the end my mother could no longer fight her human intuition and took me to the office of a doctor "sympathetic" to Christian Science, whom I overheard advising her that if she'd not brought me in I would have had at most "a day or two" to live.

Many years later, when my mother was dying at 60 in a Christian Science care home in San Francisco of untreated melanoma, her quite famous practitioner called my financee and me in to explain that my mother was not being healed through prayer because my fiancee and I were having sex before marriage.

I'm 63 now. No day has been without struggle. But the work of the poet has finally coalesced in my life as I once, as an eight-year-old, hoped it would. My life by my estimation is a triumph. But I would never want to live it again. I'm glad that you have read this and hope that you enjoy any of the books here, but particularly *Now*, and the collections of poems already in the pipeline that will follow it: *Bring Your Nights with You: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2015*, to appear in June 2018, and *Under Consideration Elsewhere*, to appear a year after that. Every body is broken; every body struggles. But each body is also an affirmation of something specific and different. I hope these poems for you will confirm the value of your embodied presence.