About My Poetry

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Why so much romantic poetry?

Well, why else but in having been blessed by some very fair ladies.........

But also sensing a need, I suppose, over the last fifteen years...some of it published and for whatever reasons...I have managed to write much of the most beautiful poetry I have ever read.

And that was before early April 2012, and a Sunday afternoon when a thriller called Collateral Damage came on. Two hours later I wondered how many years I had been asleep, before I saw Francesca Neri.

Staggered? My first poem of her, two days later, describes how fearful I was I might surely die, "now having seen her, had she never been."

A little more upbeat since, thankfully. As with most other young guys in the City of Brotherly Love, I learned to 'talk pretty' early on to the young ladies, growing up in Philadelphia. My background includes a lovely and formidable ex-wife, a younger brother and two nephews; mid-management, marketing and sales positions as well as excelling in, at times surviving an outside job in which I was...carefully sent, nearly a hundred times, to find and bring back, on my own, the cars and pickup trucks of folks who had stopped paying for them, this in central Virginia.

Also a mother, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister--she a great scholar who was also called in college 'a brunette Grace Kelly', which her wedding picture still explains. A brilliant couple, my parents, though divorced when I was six, as my dad, a big city newspaper reporter from NYC, went off to serve, ultimately as a presidential press officer, in the Civil Rights struggle.

Surviving, yes. A few years ago, I was knocked through the air by a car running a light, my forehead shattering part of the windshield (I saw the photo later). Luckily someone had cried "Look out" and I recall in the last split second before impact 'unweighting', as on a ski slope, my fingers outstretched, antennae in the dark for whatever data might be helpful, possibly helping spare me, and by extension a wonderful lady named Carmen, further...

Collateral damage, shall we say….and take it from me, best to be careful when outweighed by three thousand pounds. In closing, let me repeat: by now, thanks to Francesca, I have written most of the most beautiful poetry I have ever read. If the standards of my alma mater, an elite Eastern college, do not persuade...if the fact that it is only the utterly lovely Francesca Neri, and she alone, who can claim to be the 'true blank', as Shakespeare wrote, of my eye--if this does not convince either, then all the more reason, no doubt, to stay tuned and see for yourself.