I’m not exactly sunny by temperament. I can be a bit of a crank. But I’m not exactly dark either.

I grew up in a happy household. A complicated household, too. In hindsight, with a half-century under my belt, I can see now that it was a very complicated household. But the baseline, for me, was happy.

Nevertheless, as my therapist said the first time I met him, “The hurricane comes for everyone.”
Long story for another time. But the hurricane came for me, and stuck around for a very long while, and upended everything.

And after it passed I realized that the effect of that storm may be even more important that its causes.

Because the effect, once you survive the storm, and inspect it, and learn from it—as I’ve tried to do—is wisdom.

In my case, wisdom means a greater familiarity with darkness—with struggle, and pain, and panic, and hunger, and unhappiness…and with my own weaknesses and failures. I’ve come face-to-face with many of the things I’d been able to avoid growing up in a happy household.

The hurricane made me wiser because it allowed…no, it forced me to see that there was only a slight difference between happiness and despair. One or the other is always one coin flip a way. One word. One look. One decision. A hair’s breadth.

Suddenly, from the throes of my own dark night, I could see that there was darkness in everyone’s life—and that the darkness may actually unite us as humans.

The darkness, and the wisdom that results, are the root of compassion.

You can find some of that compassion, I hope, in my most recent chapbook, The Dark Ways Mysterious: Fragments, which is a literary journey through the forbidden energies—the creative and erotic in particular—that make us human.

And now you can find a little more of that compassion in Heel: A Life, a companion volume that tells the true story of a popular villain from the world of entertainment. Or, as the ad copy says:

“A modern folk tale. A celebrity tell-all. A story of villainy. A life told in reverse. Heel is a poem about someone you may know, but never like this…”

I won’t spoil the experience by telling you whose life story I’ve set to verse in this short booklet. (In some ways, the person’s real identity should not even matter.) I will only say that Heel is a poem I could not have written before the hurricane came for me. It is a book about darkness, that is a gift of the darkness.

I see it as a very strange act of compassion. I hope you will too.

You can download it for free at johntessitore.com.