A Poetry Book

In 2000 I spent a month living at an inner-city missions facility in Queens NY. Throughout this time Monday through Friday a group of us went throughout Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx giving food, faith, and hope to the impoverished hopeless masses in New York City. Some experiences I will never forget is playing cards with those on deaths door at the AIDS hospital, preaching in Mexican Town with a translator, taking sandwiches to those on the streets at midnight, the countless soup kitchens and coffee houses and making hundreds of children laugh as a clown on the streets in the Bronx.

Coming back to Michigan shortly thereafter, I enrolled in college and needed an income. Moved by the hand of God, in spirit, I searched online for any job openings. I simply typed in ‘youth” in the search. I went for the interview, got hired, and got trained as an Intervention Counselor in the city of Mount Clemens. This began my journey in the helping field. The field where you meet the hopeless, hurting; those people whom the devil has tried his best to destroy physically, emotional, spiritually, people the devil has attempted to devalue and dehumanize.  You meet them in hopes of undoing the devils work, in hopes of repairing, restoring, showing them their value, loving, and caring for those who have no one else; no one.

Over these past years, beginning in New York, I began to write poetry, both reflecting on situations, deflecting pain, empathizing with the hurt, and examining these effects on my life. Now these poems are together in an e-book recently published in the Kindle store.