Brought up on an Out Island of the Bahamas, I was boarding-schooled in other countries from age 7 to 17, and then spent 45 years living and working in yet other countries before retiring back home. Now I read and write (mostly poetry) and am editing a series of chapbooks of formal verse for Sampson Low in the UK. I'm already in contact with Marilyn L. Taylor through V-V, and would be glad to hear from anyone else with formal verse (preferably previously published) they would like to submit. I am frequently published in Snakeskin, Better Than Starbucks, and Bewildering Stories.​

Note: "My Best Poem" is of course a challenge... I'm sending one which my wife thinks is best ("God is Two Brothers") and one which has been reprinted more than any other, and has even been found wandering around randomly in other people's blogs ("The Squirrel in the Attic of his Brain"). But I have a personal fondness for "This Ape I Am".

GOD IS TWO BROTHERS

​
God is two brothers, one dark and one light,
Riding out Time in a tiny ship.
Half day and half night gives little room.
God knows that a rose, red rose or white,
Is a rose is a rose is a bud is a bloom
Is brown blown petals and a drying hip.
And the length of Time’s budding, blowing park
Walk the arm-linked arguers, Light and Dark. 





THE SQUIRREL IN THE ATTIC OF HIS BRAIN


The squirrel in the attic of his brain
Shreds photographs, pulls memories apart;
The old dog in the basement of his heart
Howls, lonely, soft, monotonous as rain;
And somewhere further underneath, a snake
In hibernation stirs, irked by its skin.
Up where the world’s news and supplies come in 
Through the five senses of his face, to make
The room in which a garrulous parrot squawks
And sometimes songbirds sing – it’s his belief
Mice gnaw behind the wainscots of his teeth.
The cat of consciousness, impassive, walks
Toward the door to go out for the night:
Is everything (oh dog, shut up!) all right?




THIS APE I AM


Under our armored mirrors of the mind
Where eyes watch eyes, trying to pierce disguise,
An ape, incapable of doubt, looks out,
Insists this world he sees is trees, and tries
To find the scenes his genes have predefined.

This ape I am
Who counts “One, two, more, more”
Has lived three million years in empty lands
Where all the members of the roving bands
He’s ever met have totaled some ten score;
So all these hundred thousands in the street
With voided eyes and quick avoiding feet
Must be the mere two hundred known before.

This ape I am
Believes they know me too.
I’m free to stare, smile, challenge, talk to you.

This ape I am
Thinks every female mine,
At least as much as any other male’s;
If she’s with someone else, she can defect –
Her choice, and she becomes mine to protect;
Just as each child must be kept safe and hale
For no one knows but that it could be mine.

This ape I am
Feels drugged, ecstatic, doped,
Hallucination-torn, kaleidoscoped, 
That Earth’s two hundred people includes swirls 
Of limitless and ever-varied girls.

This ape I am
Does not look at myself
Doesn’t know about mirrors, lack of health,
Doesn’t know fear of death, only of cold;
Mirrorless, can’t be ugly, can’t be old.