Vinyl Format
With a nostalgic nod to how the poet grew up, he has taken the music generated for the poems of Tome of Stars and created vinyl discs. This is currently being done with the service from Elastic Stage, a vinyl and CD print-on-demand (POD) company. POD removes the need to engage vinyl presses that require 100s of print runs, securing storage, and obtaining a sales mechanism. With POD, each disc ordered is printed “on demand” and shipped to the customer—manufacturing, storage (none), and fulfillment are accomplished third party. This allows a poet of modest means an opportunity to offer this medium for the music.
Each album comes with multiple discs, yielding a total of 14 discs for the main book (the “companion” albums will add another 10 discs or so). Each disc has to be released from Elastic Stage as a separate product as their print-on-demand (POD) vinyl currently doesn't allow for multi-disc packaging. Therefore, to make it clear, to get all the songs for a specific album, one has to buy multiple discs. For example, album one, Anthesis, has a DISC ONE and a DISC TWO. These are two separate products on the Elastic Stage website (but bundled into one “release group” page, but each must be ordered independently). To get all the songs for this two-disc album, both products (two discs) need to be purchased.
Tome of Stars is not monetized and the books are sold at cost. Everything is downloadable for free from this website and other places such as Internet Archive. However, Elastic Stage's POD model (required as the author cannot afford to make and house large print runs of vinyl) has a lowest price tier of ~40 USD. The author does not collect royalties for these discs, but cannot set the price any lower, unfortunately.
Anthesis: Item 1 of “Tome of Stars”
Two-Disc Album
The opening album of Tome of Stars, titled Item 1: Anthesis, comprises nineteen poems that chronicle the flowering of a romance. It is named from the botanical term for the period during which a flower blooms. As with most of the poems in the collection, the language oscillates between intimate and mythic. Cosmic and classical imagery embeds a personal romance inside more metaphysical concerns. The poems in Anthesis haphazardly chronicle a narrative from discovery and vulnerability to embraced adoration. Foundational motifs in the poet's mind are introduced and nurtured here, and will arise repeatedly in different contexts as the collection progresses and the relationship evolves. Overall, this section introduces the Stargirl as both a woman of the poet's fancy and as a mythical figure in his awareness, overwhelming in her effect on him, the material reality of human interactions crossing over to the transcendent and spiritual in his conceptualizations. These aspects will recur, be deconstructed, and forever haunt the verse (and the poet) in what follows. They set the emotional and symbolic architecture of the stage on which tragedy and transformation will unfold.
Preview Anthesis Vinyl: Disc One
Preview Anthesis Vinyl: Disc Two
Senescence: Item 2 of “Tome of Stars”
Four-Disc Album
The poems of Senescence unfold toward heartbreak. Forces too easy to understand drive the lovers apart despite their depth of feeling. All the intrusions that myth-making cannot transfigure make their appearance: trauma carried forward from unspoken pasts, ingrained patterns of avoidance and reaction, external obligations and pressures, wounds of culture and gender and expectation. Here, the poet and his beloved fail each other, even as they try to hold on. Some poems grapple with memory. Others with guilt. Some ache with need and some lash with anger. Through them all runs an undiminished and unresolved current of longing for the beloved. These struggles continue into the next items, without closure, as the poet ages decades through his life yet cannot find any answer to his loss. The title Senescence evokes aging and decay. The botanical term extends beyond natural context to the existential with emotional, spiritual, and mythic connotations. A seemingly celestial relationship falters under the weight of flawed embodiment. What once seemed timeless is imprisoned within time. Even in the wreckage, there are glints of the eternal. And the burden of profound loss. But in that brokenness, something essential survives, a sacred grief that carries forward into what comes next.
Preview Senescence Vinyl: Disc One
Preview Senescence Vinyl: Disc Two
Preview Senescence Vinyl: Disc Three
Preview Senescence Vinyl: Disc Four
Sporogenesis: Item 3 of “Tome of Stars”
Two-Disc Album
Item 3 of Tome of Stars is Sporogenesis, a haphazard chronicle of the years 2011–2020, a period of withdrawal and emotional hibernation, titled from the biological process of spore formation. It is a metaphor for self-preservation, protecting fragments of love and self from an external and internal universe too hostile to survive with open feeling. However, a stirring breaks the surface during and after the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. In that silence, the poet dissects aspects of his psyche that had eluded him for five decades. He finally grasps his inability to live truthfully to himself and his emotional devotion to the Stargirl. This leads to action. The poet risks a painful and vulnerable outreach to her. He shares the revelations he uncovered. He confesses what he had hidden throughout their relationship: shame of his past, deep abusive trauma (the source of his behavioral paralysis), and the love for her that had always burned alongside it. But life is capricious and cruel. His communications fall into the wrong hands. Her privacy violated, the beloved reacts not with the compassion that he desperately sought, but with fury and judgment. This Item thereby ends with a devastating wound. This terrible fall drops him into the hostile landscape of Item 4: Anemochory.
Preview Sporogenesis Vinyl: Disc One
Preview Sporogenesis Vinyl: Disc Two
Anemochory: Item 4 of “Tome of Stars”
Two-Disc Album
Anemochory, from the botanical term for wind-borne seed dispersal, is the fourth Item of Tome of Stars. It is a metaphor for a most desolate phase of emotional scattering, spiritual disorientation, and theological anguish. Sporogenesis was the quiet sealing of the self, but Anemochory unleashes fragile seeds and sprouts into a merciless world, flinging fragments of the poet outward in compulsion as much as hope. The section lacks any cohesive arc. It documents a mind unmoored, careening between damnation, spiritual nullification, and collapse. Even its dance opening, Tillana, spirals into frenzy and ruin. It concludes not with wild frenzy, but with its inverse in the poem Absolute 0.
Preview Anemochory Vinyl: Disc One
Preview Anemochory Vinyl: Disc Two
Quixotosis: Item 5 of “Tome of Stars”
Two-Disc Album
The fifth Item of Tome of Stars is Quixotosis. It symbolizes the poets transformation to a sustained state of paradoxical, impractical idealism. Emerging from the frozen madness of Anemochory, this item depicts a fractured self that has now surrendered to its nature while struggling to find a way to live honestly with those those truths. He accepts permanent separation from the beloved, yet still orbits her internally - a love and longing without hope of return. Thus it is not a state that is free of tempest. And in the end, while he remains Owned, he finally realizes his delusion about the beloved's feelings, and surrenders the belief in the Stargirl's love. This final progression moves him into the final item, Scripture, in which he continues the "quixototic" state, but from the point of view of timeless but unfulfilled adoration.
Preview Quixotosis Vinyl: Disc One
Preview Anemochory Vinyl: Disc Two
Scripture: Item 6 of “Tome of Stars”
Two-Disc Album
The final Item of Tome of Stars is Scripture. Here, the narrative arc is abandoned and instead what is presented is a steady-state consecration of the poets unrequited love. Quixotosis is transformed into Liturgy. In the early stages of conceptualizing Tome of Stars, Scripture (then titled simply "Prologue") was intended as a quirky prose introduction to this book of poems, written from the perspective of a devotee of a cult of the Stargirl. In language befitting such an acolyte, this devotee describes the cult's mythology, his personal mystical encounter with the Stargirl, and the aftermath of how it shaped his life. The man is clearly more generally a proxy for the poet, his religious devotion a metaphor for the poet's emotional commitment, and the religious experience of encountering this cosmic force, both the heaven of it and the hell of losing it, is directly reflective of the poet's personal emotional journey and the transformative impact of the beloved on his life. He placed the final poem Uni Verse after Scripture, as a coda to the entire work, not as an element of the sixth Item. "Uni Verse" is a meta poem, retrospectively looking back on the poems that came before, commenting on them, and speaking directly to the reader to break the fourth wall.
Preview Anemochory Vinyl: Disc One
Preview Anemochory Vinyl: Disc Two