Me, a blogger?

I’m not a blog guy by nature – having been born in a kingdom long ago. But I feel my new book, Clinging to Ghosts, an unvarnished, hopefully entertaining look back at moments in a life, deserves an audience.

And frankly, it’s tough to find one on Amazon, amid an endless sea of books by known authors. And the fact that it’s poetry, albeit plainspoken, accessible poetry, makes it just about impossible.

Below are a couple of samples from the book to give you a taste of its human, relatable, often wryly amusing style. If you like what you read, you can buy the book on Amazon here.

In future posts, I’ll be offering musings, more poems and other tidbits as seen through the lens of an old guy coping with aging and this fucked-up world we all share. Till we meet again, be safe, be sane and true to your best self.

Mike D.

Hot Rods From Hell

 When the hot chick in the ’55 T-bird

peels out at the light, leaving us in the dust

of a misty South Jersey morning,

my dad turns to me and says,

“What’s she trying to prove.”  

And I’ve got to admit he’s got a point.

I mean out-gunning a 40-something

tax attorney in a dead-ass Buick sedan—

what kind of fun is that? Who knows,

maybe she saw something in his sober,

bespectacled face I was too young to see,

because suddenly I’m being whipped back

in the goddamn bench seat, my dad

blasting past her like he’s a wheelman

in Hot Rods From Hell or something, and

next thing I know the T-bird babe’s flashing

this come and get me smile I defy any man

to resist, as dad roars past her, testing the limits

of the Buick’s torque in ways that would have had

the engineers back in Dearborn scratching

their heads if they were with us that day,

but if they were, it would have made dad

uptight and self-conscious and none of this

ever would have happened, though for the rest

of his days, he pretended it never did.

Buds

I’m not going to lie,

I’ve smoked marijuana

in my day.

In fact today,

walking on a rickety bridge

to nowhere,

I reached for a bowl

& was blown away

by rhino-gray & crimson ribbons

drifting into the crepuscular sky,

bringing me back

to a late April afternoon

a zillion years ago

when Josh Rosenblatt who sits

next to me in Modern British Lit,

his ringlets of ink-black hair

everywhere,

introduces me to weed

at his pad on Bleecker

where I’m so certain they’ve put 

fatal shit

in the onion dip,

I ask Josh & his buds to leave,

my sanity restored

by the blessed chords

of Donovan’s “Wear Your Love Like

Heaven” drifting down from

a rhino-gray & crimson sky.

Memory impairment, perhaps.

I’m not going to lie.