((You are a sensitive soul, easily frightened by hobgoblins and untamed prose styles, and already wondering a little anxiously why you are caught here betwixt brackets; and as my reader, you have an ill-defined right to know why. You are here, gentle reader, because I put you here—not without a rather seamy ulterior motive, either. I have plotted to bring you down to the bottom of the page and to my level because, like Kierkegaard, reading for my examination is the longest parenthesis I have ever known, and while I don't wish to seem forward, I'll be much happier if we go into this hand-in-hand.) These are simple poems: nothing you can't read while you clean your teeth. (No. I can't think of a less sententious synonym for "poem", and I'm wise enough not to try. If you really want to be analytical—and who doesn't want to be analytical? I Certainly not I—they closely resemble bad English translation of almost certainly mediocre haiku written by sad and over-worked Japanese businessmen unhappily married to young and ailing wives, in draughty Toyko bus shelters in mid-July.) To you the "simple" may seem the unconscionably brief; to me it implies the incredibly lightweight. Perhaps I should tell you—just to keep this writer-reader relationship crisp and revealing —that this all-too-prosaic afterthought has been placed here, like the weighted bottom of a lampstand. to hold these poems down, else the wee things sail oil like Christmas balloons (They are also Utterly Zenless, I might add. There's not even a humble Stone buddha in this cherry orchard.) I once seriously contemplated (oh. the things we tell you) of moulding—or hewing—this lumpish footnote into a shoe of truly nurseryrhyme proportions (perhaps with a lotus petal or the merest trace of hototogisu faece adhering to the sole, and with Homily, Pod, and little Arriety snug inside, to keep it homely) but it would be much too clever, and I am tired. Solemn with sleep. I think I'll just slip out of here now, and leave you to face this bracket alone . . .)

[sic]