Sometimes I like to poke around at working on pieces that deliberately violate certain hard-and-fast poetry "rules", such as avoiding redundancies and clichés as much as possible. Well, this piece has a generous measure of both of those particular poetic eyesores. :P

Beyond that, there's not much else to unpack other than a reference to one of my own earlier pieces, namely "Thieves in Time", which I wrote way back in 1989, and which was in my first published collection of poetry, namely "Shattered Images".

I also took some measure of inspiration for one of the most visually arresting album covers from the seventies, namely Styx's 1975 album "Equinox", which was the first they did after signing to A&M records after getting out of their shitty contract at RCA/Wooden Nickel records, the two most well-known songs off of Equinox being "Lorelei" and "Suite: Madame Blue". As for the cover of Equinox, it is a photograph depicting an ice cube that's been set on fire, and I've always thought it quite the appropriate metaphor.

Another diffuse musical inspiration comes from Neil Young's song "After the Goldrush", and specifically the cover version that was done by British folk group "Prelude". The most striking difference between Prelude's cover and Neil Young's original version, is that Prelude changes the wording of one particular line to: "Look at Mother Nature on the run, in the 1917" as opposed to the original wording of "Nineteen Seventies". That single line instantly made it so that Prelude was singing about a scene in the midst of the destruction of the Great War, whereas Neil was making a more general statement about environmental degradation in the time that was current to the song's writing. Or, as Neil, himself has said in interviews: "The song's meaning comes from whatever I was taking at the time."