Eight years ago, a small flame was lit in the core of my being, the very heart of me. With a few exceptions it has only grown. Each thing I see, remember or dream is like a small piece of driftwood thrown onto the flame, until it grows to a bonfire. The trick is to keep this fire as the warmth and fuel within me, and to not let it grow to where it consumes me utterly, leaving a spent shell in its glowing wake....
The story of Edward Myers, poet.....
I guess this story truly begins in 1996. At the age of 17, fed up with the conformity and dishonesty of self that permeated my life like a creeping infection, I "dropped out" and sought a new path. I wound up finding a few friends who were on similar paths and we founded a band called the Four Horsemen. We never really got off the ground unfortunately, but artistically for me it opened eyes and opened doors. I found a new voice for myself and my handbasket of issues, articulated in a connective fashion with my musical pursuits. At this time I also let my wild side loose and all the demons that come with that.
After the Horsemen I experimented with my own band but ultimately decided against it and sought an adventurous life and began the search for a soulmate. That search consumed all and took me to Cincinnati right after high school in 1997. I wound up, at 18, living with someone and proceeding to melt down any bridges I had with my family and most of my friends on the other side of the state. There was a mess that even if I were to talk about it would take far too long to discuss here. She also destroyed much of my poetry and song lyrics from the Horsemen era, thus accounting for the lack of works from that time with few exceptions. Some later works had to be in fact "recreated" from what I remembered just so some semblance of them would exist. When I eventually returned home it was never the same. I can say, though, I had a renewed relationship with my father that began a while after I returned, and we had never previously been close.
Then, in 1998, my father died suddenly, two weeks after our reconciliation. I lost it, and so did my mother. I went to Michigan to embark on another relationship doomed to failure that probably broke my romantic heart far more than the previous one, and wound up following my mother out to Tucson and slowly descended into an anarchic alcoholic haze of abject misery to the point where it seemed as though I had a split personality. Much of the time is blurry even in the rare periods where I was sober. I just didn't care for anyone or anything, including myself, to make any positive headway in my life--but I did write some of my best poetry during this time, even while drunk.
After 1999 I stopped writing poetry for a long while. At first I was working on a novel based loosely on Zed Starchild, my Horsemen stage persona. Then, after several failed returns to Ohio and drunken binges and then returning to Tucson with hopes of reconciling at least with my mother, not to mention that late 1998 suicide of my best friend Tony, I was burnt out. I wanted a "normal" life away from temptations and demons and anarchy of mind and soul--but it was not to be.
Throughout 2000 I wrote little and none survives. This is when I married my first wife. Now, I admit I made a grave mistake marrying her and did so before I really got to know her (or did I ever know her?) as we were headed back to Ohio for one last try for me at a homecoming (she had never been there, had lived in Tucson most of her life) .
Once we were in Ohio it was an awful situation wherein, largely because of her, any remaining goodwill I had in town was destroyed and I was all but run out of town on a rail. Then another friend of mine, Jim Mitchell, committed suicide. I too began to wonder if it was worth it anymore. The poet was still, the muse was in hiding, the dream was dead. Or was it?
After our return to Tucson things got worse. Tiring of her endless games--she lived her entire life in character, it was only which one you got on a given day and how you had to act with it that differed--and her desire to "share" the marriage which I wanted no part of, I got out. Once again, I disappeared only this time not so much in search of adventure as in a search for peace and meaning. We separated and I moved in briefly with my mother who by this time wasn't even close to the person I remembered. Meanwhile I began to communicate again with Avis Brown, my friend and confidant, who had in fact been having her own relationship difficulties. She lived in South Dakota, and ultimately when I decided to break out I went there. Almost immediately after this my writing picked up again and I broke new ground with it. For the first time since the Horsemen days I sounded a hopeful tone, a defiant tone, with some of my poetry. I also began work in earnest on my novel, and opened other projects as well. In Avis I found a friend, confidant, lover, muse, guide and companion. She was, in fact, the one I had been searching for way back in 1997, though I didn't know it, or her, then.
We found love but also great difficulty as we had to move several times, lived in a motel for several months and so on. But in this time I finished my novel, began a second, wrote out my life story which was far more action packed than you'd think for someone my age, wrote new poetry and started to organize the old. I was exploring new artistic and philosophical directions in my life, searching for broader meaning and my spiritual direction.
Then, a disaster. Avis was struck by a car. The result was a three week hospital stay and ultimate confusion as we were already running out of money and options in the Black Hills. We wound up moving in with her parents(In Maine, where we are to this day) for lack of anywhere else to go. Eventually things started to improve somewhat and I started writing again, this time taking a spiritual, mystical, at times almost shamanic direction with my works. However many other problems stood in the way...
As 2003 and my 24th year arrived I found a true spiritual path, the Pagan path, and took my writing to a whole new level. My divorce finally happened and I married Avis on 25 September. I am currently in addition to this book, working on a book about Jim Morrison, who is at least poetically an inspiration in my work; and trying to just "be." I do still write plenty of new stuff and maybe one day I'll come full circle and do music again. Matt Semple, cofounder of the Horsemen band, once said the Horsemen wouldn't be much in the beginning but 10 years from their founding (2006) we would reunite and set the world on fire! Who knows, stranger things have, indeed, happened.......
My goal....to have my poetry published in book form. While the website I set up last year was a great way of condensing my musings and ramblings into a compact, readable form, I crave the publication of my work in a tangible form. I guess it might be better at least in limited edition for the select few who I really wish to grasp my work at this point. Mass marketing and mass communication is not my goal right now, for I know my poetry isn't for everyone. That's not to say I'll not ever entertain dreams of "spreading the word", as it were, for larger numbers of people.
I am currently working on a way to bring this dream to its realization. One day I may also have a publishing company of my own.....but one never plans too far ahead. Music? Maybe someday, never rule it out entirely like a white brushstroke over a once fertile canvas. But again, it's not in my immediate sights. Stay tuned.....
originally written for my first website in December 2003.
Observations on Poetic Vision
