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ABOUT MYSELF My mother, whose name was Mary, lived on a ship at sea with her parents. Her father was an officer of the British Navy, and officers were permitted to have their family live on board with them during times of peace. I often wonder how my mother felt with very few friends at sea, not having any appropriate love interest, but being of the age to want to marry. One evening, sitting on a comfortable bench on the deck alone, as she often did, a man whom she had never seen before approached her. She might have been afraid and called for the midshipmen to sound the alarm, but his disarming manner and the import of his words held her steadfast. He introduced himself and explained why he had to meet her. He told her, "I have just stepped onto this planet and have taken a human form." Upon asking who he was, where he came from, and the nature of his true form, he told her that in the night sky, where they were then, beneath the canopy we all see, there are a quintillion stars, and if it is somehow a general belief among the people of Earth that there is at least one planet and satellite orbiting those stars, then he must have been from them all. Furthermore, he came to Earth to meet my mother and her parents specifically, to leave a child to her. That son, he told her, would know his full purpose when he was an adult and would feel his calling in a catastrophic time that humanity faced. It was then that her mother joined them, and her father too, and what that family heard next left them with much to think about. For this Starman told them that this planet was ruled by God, as it was written among the sacred and holy writings of the authentic world religions. In those cases when an otherworldly birth is required, then the most proximate canonical or Holy Book must be followed verbatim in proximity to where that conception occurred, so as not to

offend the Lord, who is invisible to people but nevertheless exists for the well-being of the whole planet Earth. Then he explained that because the ship they were on was a naval vessel from Britain, the Holy Bible made it necessary that the birth she would have could only be a virgin birth. Moreover, he would transmute into semen and exist only as the offspring of the virtue of who he was when he met my mother, and as her son related in her descent of her both her mother and father’s ancestry on earth. The child would thus only have earthly ancestors from her side of the family, as he had no descendants on Earth, by being God. Finally, he told them it must be done, and that the child should be born in Helvetia, or modern-day Switzerland. There was no amount of time to consider anything else but accept his purpose, which he stressed was a necessary fact that would have to occur. My mother, her mother and father, hardly fully thinking the matter over, found themselves alone. It was within a month after that night's encounter with the Starman and his transmutation, that the ship's doctor informed my mother that she was pregnant. She recalled the date of conception as being none other than the night they still spoke about among themselves as a family. On careful thought, they made plans that Mary, although British in nationality, would give birth in Switzerland, which was in ancient times Helvetia. Her father, by writing to the Swiss Confederation and filling out the necessary applications, was granted landed immigrant status for my mother, his wife, and himself. They then purchased a home in the lower region of the French-speaking Alps. My full name on the official Swiss Birth certificate was given as Ignatius Quintillion Apple by Apple. Ignatius Apple was my grandfather's legal name. Quintillion is my middle name in memory of the Starman who appeared that night before her, and the name of my father was

entered on the birth certificate as being Quintillion Star. Then my mother, unwed, changed her name Mary Apple to Mary Apple by Apple and I took that surname also, which remains as surnames go, as far as I know, exclusive to my mother and me. As our family’s story is told it was only some semen and Mary Apple that we understood was in nature an example of a veritable virgin birth. When I used to ask my mother about my father's whereabouts, she would simply say that he was at sea. It was an inside joke of hers, as I later came to know the unconventional circumstances of my conception. I exist solely because of the mysterious visitor my mother encountered that night, and I may never know who my biological father was, except that he transmuted into the semen which fertilized her ovum, which developed, for nine months, as a healthy fetus in my mother’s womb, until the day I was born in 1969. My life could have been normal among the people of Switzerland, but for the unexpected fact that I was born a dwarf. This fact was overlooked by my mother's obstetrician and my pediatrician. However, while sitting beneath a tree and nursing me one day, several feisty short people, whom my mother immediately understood were dwarves, attempted to persuade her to give me up to them, claiming that I was not a human and belonged with them. My mother vehemently protested, as did my grandmother who was present. Nevertheless, the undeniable truth remains that I was among the dwarves, known to many as Iggy, and hence my penname, Iggy the Dwarf. It is indeed remarkable that I am a dwarf among the dwarves of Helvetia, and this has captivated the curiosity of all those involved, considering my mother is human and so was the visitor in any form we understood him to be who appeared that fateful night on the ship. The dwarves were adamant that they played no tricks in relation to my birth, and we accepted their honesty. Such was the mystery surrounding my existence that rumors spread among the people of Helvetia, suggesting that my mother was a

virgin mother of God, drawing parallels to the biblical Mary. However, these speculations were later dismissed based on the trust placed in my mother's word of honor, that we might be killed with so high a thought of our miracle. I soon grew up as just another dwarf and lived with my human mother in the lower Alps, and lived as was deemed best as a dwarf among the dwarfs of Helvetia. Any calling I might have, which was foreseen by the visitor to the planet, came in the late 1980s when I was eighteen years old. On a late summer’s day, I heard what sounded like thunder, and disbelieving that there could be a storm on such a clear day, looked up to the sky. It seemed like a shadow of long arms, much like the tentacles of a gigantic octopus, and there were dwarves descending to the ground from the sky. They landed and appeared identical in form and appearance to the folks they were near, fully clothed. Not only that, but to our surprise, after a month of strange times and quarrels, my mother and I still felt like ourselves, but we were left wondering how many authentic dwarves were left alive in Helvetia, or indeed the world, and how many more were alien shapeshifters. By word of mouth, passed down through the authority of friends, the fullest weight by consensus related that the aliens as it then stood far outnumbered us and even enjoyed eating us, euphemistically calling us "turkey." Only my mother and I could be sure that I was a real dwarf of Helvetia and not a shapeshifter, and I felt sure of my mother’s true nature as the human parent I always knew her to be as an unquestionable fact. It was popularly believed that authentic dwarves were fewer in number by a great magnitude than before the shapeshifters came, and fewer in proportion in number relative to the entire number of aliens was a probable conclusion. My mother and I then wondered what had befallen human beings. That very concern for humanity burned inside me and became an obsession. It was my calling; I decided to be a secret agent and live among

humans to assess what, if anything, had happened among them. Had the same invasion befallen them? My life among humans has been difficult. From the time I was eighteen, I have been considered odd-looking, often called a midget, sometimes more politely, a little person. Not only that, but the burning question I had to discover was whether the shapeshifters were among humans or not. This has led me to frequently experience bouts of mania and insomnia. I was early on diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a condition like manic depression, with the exception that the manic state lasts notably longer in the sufferer than it does in true bipolar cases. Now in my middle age and finding no recognition among my social workers, doctors, or friends who have come or gone, of any memory that in the 1980s there was any alien presence or invasion of shapeshifters, the best advice given to me, by a social worker with lived experience of mental illness, was to not let it consume me, lose great amounts of sleep and health over my questionings, but to express them artistically. I was reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the passages of the monster’s words of lament to Dr. Frankenstein about hiding himself from humans because he would only frighten them. The monster mentioned overhearing the happy life of a family and their children, whose land he had taken upon himself to settle in and who kept out of their way, to ensure they never saw him because he knew they would fear him. He expressed the immense profundity he felt while reading Milton and other authors, who spoke in such an elevating way about the preciousness of human existence. He inspired me to compose the poems you read in this book, in the form of adaptation, with much intertext based on many authors of whom Mary Shelley and her contemporaries would have read when they were modern authors.

The purpose of this experiment I indicate in the preface below; they are written to discover if any such traditional poetry is welcome in society among shapeshifters, from the perspective of the underclass. For that is the class I have found myself living amongst most, having the diagnosis I was given, and living like many people as dependents of the social welfare system on disability. I gravitated toward poetry naturally, as do many writers, before writing in prose. I am left with the question, yet unanswered, that still rules my life. It is the question of whether 'Homo Sapiens' experienced the 1980s invasion of shape-shifting aliens, and if met with a blank stare or disbelief, I have the second problem to solve, as to whether the invasion either in its entirety did not affect humans, or worse, that so few exist, such few numbers of humans remain to advise me of what really happened. I have only by remaining in sporadic contact with Dwarves in Helvetia some justified true belief of a trust that a multitude of ‘Homo Sapiens’ live some where in light years from Earth in the trust that if they are not eaten by ‘Homo Exterior’ might return to our world, in the outcome of a thirst-five year duration, from 1988-2023, and one which I must witness at least, before returning to the place of my birth origin. One thing that I was able to do during my life among the underclass, with its underworld connections, was to invest in a shipping business. By filling a ship with transport goods, by a set form of rudimentary questions about the contents that required safe passage by sea – questions such as “Is it alive or dead?” and “Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral?” and qualifying the cargo by narrowing the field or disqualifying it from transport, I soon was able with three partners I joined to purchase a small fleet, and left it in a trust that they would run the company from Switzerland, and safekeep my stake in the business, while I sought the fate of humanity abroad in

North America. Before I left, I spoke with my mother of her father’s belief of distant relatives who owned land in Britain, which was known in general to be rich with oil and natural gas deposits, but which was never exploited because there had been a shipwreck off the coast and no survivors, and for drilling to occur, it was thought by the families of the departed, that the ocean floor and the land should not be developed. However, I knew by my mother’s recollection of that family’s land, that the bodies had been recovered and buried elsewhere, and there was no outstanding reason to prevent the progress of the energy industry in England. Before returning to North America at the age of twenty-eight, I approached this family, and the true owner of the land I met was a Lord of the upper house of parliament in Britain. He and his wife had a young daughter who, I recall, was only six years old at the time. By understanding I developed with the family, I gave instructions to my partners that when my shipping company had made me sufficient wealth to buy, restore, and hold tenure of a certain Baronetage in Britain, they were to purchase it on my behalf. The Lord and Lady, to whom I presented myself, accepted that when I returned to them in my middle age, I would have permission to court their daughter, so long as she was not against the idea. I told the child a fairy story when I was with her of terrible shapeshifters and a dwarf who was bound to be far away on another continent on a mission to ascertain what calamity had befallen the people of Earth. She listened closely to my tale and fell asleep in her mother’s arms upon the last few words I spoke that I would return, and the young lady would become a Baroness, if only she could bear such a one as so disregarded as a dwarf deemed as maladjusted in the mental health system of North America. My fame as a poet received some critical attention when CBC Radio featured my work in 2015. This was mainly due to the popularity of a website I created, where I posted my poetry.

One poem, titled "The City," caught the attention of the afternoon host of a radio program. They interviewed a doctor to discuss whether I accurately depicted professionals who work with consumer survivors, such as psychiatrists and doctors in long-term care facilities. The doctor confirmed that the poem provided an accurate portrayal, not only of himself, but also of doctors in general, and social workers. Furthermore, he believed it was a realistic depiction of the typical life of a consumer survivor. The fame of the website grew beyond Canada and reached overseas in Britain, and thereafter CBC Radio reported that a direct descendant of Lady Ottoline Morrell, the aristocrat who hosted a literary circle of friends, and who was the Lady portrayed, in T.S. Eliot’s Portrait of a Lady, took offense to my pastiche titled “The Hourglass Hostess”, for drawing an intertextual relationship or inference, that the late Lady Morrell was somehow being compared to a prostitute. My intention was not to suggest that whatsoever, but because of this grave criticism, my poetry website gained even more notoriety. The truth is, I have only once visited a prostitute and I am now celibate. Any suggestion that there was a real prostitute, as described in the poem, while I was living in a different part of Toronto than now is false. However, there was a prostitute who seemed to live in her own house in my old neighborhood. She used to walk her dog during the day and sometimes spoke with men in the area. I could not help but notice her as a familiar face around and about. I knew the house where she lived and would see her male visitors come and go. It left little doubt in my mind that she was a Lady of the Evening. I now live between Jarvis St. off Dundas St., where there are plenty of prostitutes to be seen by night, close to New Regent Park off Parliament St., in a community client-tenant subsidized building. I rent out on subsidy, what might be called a cute bachelor in a rental listing

written for the average person in the market for a small and bright apartment. Although the neighborhood can be a little dangerous, or at least colorful, the reality is that there are many prostitutes living in my community who work for their lodging and cocaine. The most unfortunate members of their profession become addicted to crack when they find out that their pimps have no more use for them as breadwinners. The saddest part is that they are more time than not reported as missing persons by their parents, and I wonder if they even realize that fact. They are likely brainwashed to believe their parents are dead, even as they become recovering addicts and reach rock bottom, often in a much-dilapidated state. I was surveyed by telephone one day and told that they were asking specifically the ten most important poets alive today their opinion of what was the most important book to be published that year. At first, I thought it was simply a crank call and could not believe that I, as an unpublished author with little recognition, except for some publicity on local radio, would be honored as one of the ten most important poets of our time. Nonetheless, I answered that the discovery and publication of a palimpsest of one of Archimedes' books on mathematics was immensely significant. This book was believed to be lost to modern civilization, but it was found superimposed on a scroll of papyrus in its full length with a religious text. The publication of this work brought it to the attention of classical scholars for the first time in modern history. Indeed, I thought at first that what I was writing was perhaps some kind of metaphorical palimpsest but stood corrected when I realized that the art form is postmodern, and formalist by no means, and that such near-contemporary authors as Cecil Day Lewis, the late father of the famous actor Daniel Day Lewis, wrote many such poems as did other poets in the course of their careers of the mid to late twentieth century.

Some of this poetry was previously published by the publisher named Literary Pastiche, under a pseudonym, in collections in breve, and out of print titled, The City, The Flower's Celandine, and An Evening Pastiche. Moreover, a collection titled Wordsworth'an Palimpsests appeared in a Canadian literary journal known as The Eclectic Muse in the year 2015. Despite some positive reviews and much marketing, as well as a press release for the premiere edition of the first publication of my poetry in book form, I live rather anonymously and am no closer to completing my mission to discover whether 'Homo Sapiens' have become endangered or vulnerable as a species of hominids on this planet, resulting in an alien invasion of shapeshifters. At this time, however, as I wait to find out of some news of ‘Homo Sapiens’ return to Earth (by what means I know not) I must be very close to joining my mother, now in her seventies, at my Wessex Palace, to be introduced to the little girl, whom I lulled to sleep, now thirty-two years old, to consider in faith my true identity as the Lord Duke of Wessex Suffolk and other titles I have, in trust my family is safe and secure as the result in this passage of time spent discovering more in the outcome of what has been profoundly felt by us all in the world among near and far uncharted regions of space who choose to enjoin and be sound among us in this God blessed post-human world of an ancient Abraham ancestor we must account as miraculous, but lacking full disclosure.