Poets

A Purpose and a Place

How did I come to be a poet? How did I come to find the very light which shines in my soul, and teach it to speak? All people, we first need to understand, have poetry. Whether it shows in a political sermon to friends, negotiating with your girlfriend, or helping an elderly neighbor with his groceries, those tiny lights find their way out one way or another, and I started writing them down.

I'm the middle child in a close-knit family of nine. We were raised in Detroit, in a loving, Catholic, Mom and Dad household that wasn't all that long ago in years, but many times seems like a different century. We were so close in age that when my oldest sister was in the first grade she had five younger brothers and sisters. It was a different era; a distant past in family upbringing becoming all too rare nowadays; for we not only lived together, but even ate dinner together also.

Many of my siblings stood out academically and athletically in both grade and high school and I, not quite ready to get on the treadmill called life, became good at another skill; just getting by.

Ive always been artistic; always a kid with empty cardboard boxes, markers, scotch tape and string, putting together one contraption or another. As a young boy and fledgling writer, I was editor of the family newspaper. The price of doing business, however, was great, as anyone old enough to have a nickel was also old enough to be an employee. In fact, the only paying customers w..