Most attempts at expression in "The Arts of Love" are essentially remedial and meditative, and this how I see much of my own writing and painting; practices that may curb one's propensity towards misery, murder or suicide, or incarceration in institutions and prison.Small comfort though are murderous and suicidal ideations as one ages, growing often more rancorous and wearier in the pursuit and capture of The Poetic Muse; that ever-present, ever-changing spring of arty vision.The last time I bagged me a top-quality poetic muse, after a few months The Muse began to behave in quite an inappropriate and most un-muse-like manner; finally, drunk, verbally abusive and waving a knife in my direction, I told this muse-turned-beast to bugger off out of it. When the muse no longer amuses, the muse is not long lived . . . so here we are, muse-less once more †but that's okay, I can handle it, for I am of genus "Rough Fluff" (rufius flufius) and so known in younger days at certain men's "clubs" throughout Europe, Asian and the United States.This selection of poems spans a period of over forty years. Not presented here chronologically, but poems that drew my interest or particular remembrance, and taken randomly from many notebooks, the backs of old envelopes and such, as a rambling sampler.