How do I, as the writer of this book, begin to describe each poem? May I start by saying that the contents of this book took half of a lifetime to complete. What I mean is that the first poem was written in 1968 when I was eighteen years old and the last finished in 2018. So, there is fifty years between the first poem and the last. The first poem was an awaking into what I refer to as my first emotional encounter with love. The poems within these pages are about love and betrayals, physical and emotional deaths. Life changing events such as chemical dependency, depression, divorce, and remarriage. Spiritual enlightenments and emotional destructions. Newfound relations that healed old wounds, but in the end, it created newer and deeper scars.
These poems also describe in detail what the heart feels when you are truly in love and the hurt and remorse when that love is gone forever. They are about sons and daughters, girlfriends and ex-wives. They are about reconnecting with loved ones who were a distant memory but were never forgotten. There are descriptions of women through the eyes of the man who loved them and what he saw in each one of them. There is forgiveness and understanding, there is hurt and sadness, there are new found freedoms and enslavements. There is a sense of time travel and reincarnation, of spiritual blessings and of being born again. There are dreams, fantasies, and secret desires.
This book is like a journey in time through the eyes, feelings, and emotions of the person who lived it. I've never considered writing a book of poetry; I only wrote the poems down as a form of personal therapy for whatever was going on in my life at the time. I've read some of these poems to various friends, and it was they who suggested I should put them in a book. It is the reason why I chose to title the book, My Life in Black and White.