I first met Herbie in Room 631 of the Chelsea Hotel where he was living with the great Australian artist Vali Myers. It was here that he had the opportunity to observe, meet, and become friends with some of the multitude of artists and outcasts and criminals and people from all walks of life who came to meet and pay homage to Miss Myers at the Chelsea.

A cozier bunch of lunatics than those who congregated in that famous room could not be found. The arguments were monumental, the dancing frenzied, and the singing, well, that is how Herbie and I became close friends - we both like to belt out a song when the spirit moves us, and it moves us often.

Herbie is one of the few people who would gladly go to war with me or follow me on some impossible quest without asking questions. He takes very seriously Baudelaire's injunction in his Paris Spleen prose poem to "Get drunk, with wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk."

My friend who in December-cold Paris would call up at the window of my little garret overlooking the Montparnasse cemetery of Baudelaire and Beckett at 10:00 a.m., with a bottle of Irish whiskey asking me to come out and play; and after starting out on a blustery New York late afternoon at the Ear Inn and meandering through the downtown westside bars of New York through the evening, he finally lamented after a dreadfully dry five blocks sans whiskey in Soho that "Life is cruel between bars."

Careening down the streets of Rome, Paris, New York and San Francisco with Herbie saying, "Yes!" to everything, open to everything lovely and things not so lovely. Herbie always has a full empathetic heart and is more capable of laughing at himself than at others. He's never cruel, but is amazed at the barbarity of those around him. He's elegant, proud and handsome, much too sensitive, conscious of his manhood as well as the little girl inside; full of pain and self doubt, and courageously battling fierce demons.

Us spending days at the Musée d'Orsay showing each other what wonders we had found. Herbie in a great museum acts like a madman let out of prison, gulping joyous great mouthfuls of beauty. Herbie's always wanting to see something beautiful, do something beautiful, make something beautiful.

My friend Herbie has a beautiful tenor voice and sings to birds and flowers and the moon and the stars and all creatures great and small. He sings ancient Celtic songs and dances Irish jigs any chance he gets.

Herbie is a railer against piety and religion and convention, and this can be seen throughout this wonderful little book. Years in gestation and full of a curious juxtaposition of poems and paintings that flow with a beautiful symmetry, Barbaric Haiku is a gift saturated with the tears and blood of our poet and painter.

It is the book of a man who sings, sometimes loudly, sometimes off key, but one whose song cannot be silenced.

It is the book of a man in love, and he manifests his love on every page. Herbie follows Gorky's maxim to "Stay in love; there's nothing better." He loves the seahorse that is tattooed on his arm. I have seen him caress a tree and wax poetic over the glory of a sunflower.

In this book, he invokes the power of his totem god, Yomen, under whose sway he came one Yom Kippur as we strolled through the Fresno, California thrift stores in search of a panama hat. He loves the beatific Blue Lady, an ephemeral image who has haunted him since his youth and who in one of her more corporeal forms came floating through his bedroom window leaving him in a puddle of youthful bliss.

To love nature, to strive to be alive and awake, to be naked, to say "Yes" to the universe, to be fierce and strong, to be courageous, to rejoice in solitude, to be forever the nomad and wanderer, to reject borders, religions and governments, these are some of the recurring themes in this memorable book.

So may I introduce to you Barbaric Haiku. It is a sand-encrusted jewel washed ashore after a journey of a million miles and a thousand years, passed from mouth to mouth to mouth, from opalescent seahorse to mutant bat to nightingale, and now lovingly entrusted to you, to cherish or revile or hurl back to the sea, as you please.

Robert W. Yarra, February 2002

INTRODUCTION by Robert W. Yarra

After not writing anything for almost twenty-five years, I am now asked to do introductions for two books, one posthumously of a friend whom I thought I would miss less, my oldest friend, the poet Marty Matz, and my very much alive dear friend Herbert Kearney, with whom I've tripped the light fantastic on many occasions and yielded to many sweet temptations; two lads out for a lark.