While I’ve tried my hand at many genres of expression throughout the past decade of my life – dabbling in mixed-media visual arts, musical performance, and even the occasional improvisational stand-up open mic night – I am compelled to declare that through it all, I have come to understand myself to be foremost and primarily a storyteller.
In this work called Pride and Glass, my debut published arrangement of writings, my goal was initially, simply, to give something of myself in written form to the world – not so much as a gift, but as a sort of immortalization of my creative expression. The shape of such a work was unclear at the start. As I collected, reviewed, edited, and gave concrete shape to individual pieces – some virtually new, and some spanning well-over a decade into the past – the whole of what has become Pride and Glass began to take shape. What I give you, in its completion, is best described, I believe, as a statement piece. While some material is autobiographical in origin, some is fictitious if observed and interpreted literally. An autobiographical free verse piece was never my endgame when compiling and arranging this body of my work. Rather, Pride and Glass is a series of statements made throughout its arrangement. It is a compilation of statements on individuality. Teenage angst and the quest toward independence and clarity of self-identity so characteristic of youth. Tears, fears, and grievances in varying life circumstances. Adventures. Sexuality. Pitfalls. Vices. Resolutions. Answers. Questions. The state of our world. Kindness, as well as travesties, committed in our interactions between one another. Irony. Parody. Nuance. Frivolity. The best of days, and the very worst. The altruistic beauty that lies therein – through all of it. I find myself inspired foremost by members of the beat generation and their writings, though emulation of their great work was neither the goal nor the resulting product. Especially upon examining my work, in noting its profane “moments,” I am reminded that it was during the days of the beat generation that the published profane word was quite literally censored. My language as a literary device is quite deliberate and quite necessary to the elements of this statement piece. Incidentally, it’s also a “nod” to those greats who dared to defy morality and propriety for the sake of liberty in raw self-expression. May this work find you well on your own journey, in your own observations along the way, and in your own self-expression. JD Sandy 2016
the more ‘open’ an Open-Book Man,
the more protected, He feels, is His most-protected secret:
it is hidden between the verses of the chapters of His being.
-jd sandy
jd sandy
Now the visible confirmation of what I knew by instinct
But had never seen: that only strange things can be beautiful -Longenbach
as familiar voices hooting and hollering
laughter. maybe my name.
i’m at my reverie balcony scrambling jumbled thoughts
racing at me shortly past my third smoke,
coffee, white pill, soda pop, two cats, and i need a shave. tonight.
young lady asked me where i got my Ring.
[my hospital shop, for a dollar, only an Oblong
looking Piece will do.] when i told her, she knew exactly me.
i am adorned with little Oddities
which, i wish, would feel enough right, at times, that
if They were right-on-point and i looked and saw
the same of them on each encounter with a man
in passing, They would lose Their luster.
i’ve tried it.
many a beach day.
in venturing into twenty-four-seven nine-to-five
and though, not trifling, that life, without my little Oddities,
ugly.
Preface
"Oddities"
All above-shown written and graphic material is authored by, and is the exclusive property of, JD Sandy, unless otherwise indicated. 2017
