Poems from Captain Salty’s uses metaphors, rhyme schemes, and word-play to mask a deeper meaning. A few are overt, and comment on issues the world needs to or has made great strides to amend. Allegories, parodies, and miscalculated tapestries imbue Salty’s pages with realism. Its poems are rarely fantastical and tend to comment on legends or crumbles from the mythical properties of history. My narrative poetry comes to light in this book. I frequently depart from the metrical and lyrical sound boards that were cells to me so long. It is truly a departure for me. There are both obvious and subtle double entendres. The poems are bold and stir the pots of diversity; they call kettles black and skim lines of perversity—just enough to simmer. They stew issues as varied as racism and women’s strides toward equality. Salty’s poems ponder isolation and disparity, how society has come together and how it has just as easily grown apart. His poems often confess how individuals meet briefly to compare notes from the heart. Life slowed things down for me in 2012. I like to say I retired from America. I quite gratefully left the game much of America plays where the dollar waits patiently at the end of every bank of cubicles, where CEOs get fat watching cogs oil their chairs so they swivel. I retired from one of the many incarnations of “the American dream.” I decided to follow my dream, the one that begins to realize itself when that dollar is replaced with a FOR RENT sign at the end of cubicles. At mid-way in life, money is not everything. In fact, it was never really anything to me except a means to a tenuous life of the odd extravagance. Peace of mind, enjoying life, and living far, far off anyone’s time continuum can last at least thirty years. Now, in 2015, that pendulous life I fed for years is remembered more as a nightmare. I savor life, I favor it and see it for what it is— or was. Captain Salty is a metaphor. He’s a sailor, a fisherman, a— salt of the earth. He is a repentant pirate, a retired buccaneer watching sea squalls and albatrosses beneath a beard. To him life’s a puzzle, and his has been lived piecemeal. He’s seen America at its best, its worst, and the odd peace between the two states.
