I discovered the power of poetry as a tool of expression in the mid 1950's.  I was caught between the pincers of the Greatest Generation and the Beat Generation.   I have written a couple dozen Haiku and found the process to be challenging and interesting; however, I am not a scholar who studies poetry as one would study a specimen in a Laboratory.  How many stanzas are in its construction or the number of syllables contained in a line is clever but inadequate to my needs. My interest in poetry is not academic but utilitarian prose.  It has been a tool that has allowed me to express the otherwise inexpressible and to record the vagaries of my life's journey.  A life force shared by many billions of other human minds is still unique.  I have always written with an urgency to explain what is happening to me and to the countless other human beings whose place in the universe is without rational explanation.  The questions have not been truthfully answered by religion or philosophy and is, as yet, beyond the concepts of a scientific community that relies on the manipulation of numbers through complicated formulae and bracketed logic.  I think the word "rational" plays a key role in this incredible mystery.   There may not be any rational answer.  There may be no reason.  It may simply be a "perfect madness."

the face of god

i stand atop the mountain

letter poem to doris

song to a northern woman

when we fall in love

i had a baby blue  t-bird

as we stand on a spinning shelf

where are your old friends