Some Poetry

First, some honesty- from a lawyer, nonetheless! Although I really enjoy poetry and admire good poets, 90% of the poetry that I've written in my life was probably written to impress a girl. Like many of my friends, I spent a good deal of my pre-married life chasing after pretty women. At UC Berkeley, many girls liked poetry- so I ended up writing a ton of cheezy poems.

Some of the poems were just funny invites to a coffee or a dinner.

Others were more traditional "come hither" poems- "come share with me a lover's night, no moon, nor stars, just you and I, two lights in darkness, together so bright."

For a period of time when I was seeing an actual poet, I wrote more traditional poems- about world issues like AIDS- "I write to you, who could never write to me, your night has passed to stars that we can no longer see, etc, etc.." I think some of these poems were even published, but I have no illusions about the skill level.

Here's a sample (reproduced by memory) of my work.



The Baby

She lies next to me tonight
Her slender arms clutching a
Baby Doll she thinks she
may never really have

Tears run slowly down her
Small brown eyes and she looks
out to the world through
a watery prism that sees only
the pain that remains

A night of red, gray, and black
when a man too much like me
showed her what a woman was for
A friendship betrayed under a moon
that had belonged to lovers
the light of the stars faded
Never to return

No, she cries
The tears fall faster now
I put my clumsy arm around her
and she just clutches the baby tighter
Finding in the baby doll the hope
She can't find in me anymore

She lies next to me tonight
Her slender arms holding a
Baby Doll that I wish
We could have really had



And that's why I became a lawyer instead of a poet!

Here's a link to some poetry that I like

Willie Perdomo

Geoff Bouvier

Lizz Huerta


The first two were teachers of mine- they had to put up with having a hypercritical lawyer in their workshops.

"So, what exactly is so great about Kafka's weird sentences?"
"What if I don't especially feel like writing about my childhood?"
"What's the point of this?"

But, they were both incredibly patient and informative. I recommend their poetry books to anyone with an amazon.com account. Perdomo's poetry is fun, incisive and actually educational about social issues. You can learn a lot about the streets, reading his work. Sometimes, it's more fun to listen to his work as you'll see from the link. As a fellow "mutt", I enjoy his takes on what it feels like to be considered both black and Latino.

Bouvier is more cerebral and nerdy in his approach- the finely constructed sentence turned on its head, hidden messages in the poetry and such... You can easily spend an hour contemplating a single poem in his book "Living Room." His best work is not online, but in the book, so I urge you to buy a copy (or, if you know me, borrow mine.)

The third poet, Lizz Huerta, has no books for purchase online, but has a blog where she will be posting a poem a day. I haven't read enough of her poems to launch a full critique- but the poem that I linked- "To Know" is a brilliant analysis of your typical Latino father- sacrificing for his children and swallowing his pain, but perhaps sacrificing his children by his emotional distance. It has a beautiful allusion to the story of Abraham and Isaac.

I have always loved poetry- Gustavo Adolfo Bequer, Neruda, Emerson and many others were inspiring to me and enriching to my life. It's wonderful to see how a tiny poem can have a depth that is so profound. Sometimes even just a line sticks with you. Like "if eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being."

Pretty cool stuff. Poetry- it's not just for chasing women!