Easy Living

Easy Living is an eclectic collection of poems about Southern Arizona and beyond. Poems deal with COVID, politics, the border, the land, writing, religion, and the author's time in Vietnam as a member of the Navy's Seabees. It includes photos taken by the author. An early offering, The Pigeon Hotel, was written in 1973 during my first and last year working as a newspaper reporter on a small Indiana daily. As one could see from the poem, my reportorial career was short. An earlier poem, Christmas in Taiwan, 1968, was about my harrowing flight back to Chu Lai, Vietnam from Taiwan where I had spent five days if intoxication and debauchery. The oldest offering, White Boys Blues, Harlem 1964 is about what happens when two other naive recent high school friends and I wind up lost in Harlem . It was a Saturday night and we had been looking for Count Basie's Lounge, a bar we found in a guidebook called New York on Five Dollars A Day. The poem, $150 A Day Habit, was written after I broke up with my fiancee in 1973. I was reading a newspaper article about a heroin addict while standing on the El platform in Chicago. As I read the story it seemed like love was an addiction. I could sympathize with the addict and scrawled down the poem as the train wobbled down the track. More current poems deal with politics, like the gun culture, An American Obsession, and The Parade That Never Happened, my fantasy about a military parade President Trump wanted to have after visiting Putin in Russia. With New Genesis Days 1-7, I got myself roped into more time and research than I had anticipated. Writing a short history of the earth was quite a challenge. Sacriment at the Border is about a trip I took to the Mexican border with a local church to distribute food and water and the surprise rescue by the Border Patrol.