Remember, right off the bat, 100% of my royalties goes to Take Back The Night. The Journey of this book started in 2000 under the name Return As A Once Dead Man which is a combination of two lines from the poem what the heck is he talking about? Unfortunately I got bored with that project and literally threw out 40% of the poems in that book. I wish I had at least one back, it was more of a note to myself on a lost poetry style I had learned about in college, while not an excellent poem it was an excellent representation of the style.

                In 2006 the edited version of Return As A Once Dead Man made a comeback in a spiral bound DTP which I gave out to friends at Christmas. I never gave releasing a proper book any thought until recently. The following is the story I wrote and posted on my blog, it relates to Nicole Joslyn and Alan Lowrie the death of whom prompted the project.

As I have stated I did not know Nicole or Alan nor do I know the Joslyn or Lowrie family. So then why I am I selling 1000 copies of my book and donating proceeds to Take Back The Night in their name? The strange story is below. I have no plans to focus on their untimely death but to tell of their life through articles and stories I have read.

October 23, 2005 I was on lunch, at work, and reading the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Like most I do not read the obituaries and as I sped through the pages I stopped, intrigued by a memorial for someone named Nicole Chartre’ Joslyn. What interested me? The first is that the memorial was being held at an Arby’s the second is that in every picture of the Nicole not one looks alike. How can pictures of the same person all look different? To this day I have not found a picture that matches.

Lunch was over but I wanted to find out more about this memorial so I tossed the whole section of the paper into my locker and forgot about it. Flash forward to 2009. I was in a personal challenge to write a poem a day and post it to a forum online. I don’t remember what day it was but I wrote a poem that really made no sense to me, about wishing I could turn back time and be there for her, those who have read my work know "Her" and "She" are central characters in many of my works.

As I sat there pondering I thought of that memorial article, for the first time in almost 4 years. I pulled out the memorial and looked up Nicole online and froze. What I wrote applied to her perfectly. I named the poem Nicole. Why did I write a poem that confused me? Why did I suddenly think of the memorial tucked away and yellowing in my locker? Who knows.