Poems from Captain Salty's: Crumbles of Piecemeal Pie

By Michael P Amram

Poems from Captain Saltys 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 Saltys 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 perversityjust enough to simmer. They stew issues as varied as racism and womens strides toward equality. Saltys 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 anyones 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. Hes 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 lifes a puzzle, and his has been lived piecemeal. Hes seen America at its best, its worst, and the odd peace between the two states.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jul 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490762630

Michael P Amram

I have been a published author since 2005. I first published a nonfiction book called, rhetorically, Would God Move a Ping-Pong Table? It is sub-titled “a cumulative analysis of faith and religion. No, I honestly do not think God would move a Ping-Pong table. But it was moved in 1988 in a dormitory at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, and my Christian dorm mate still insists I attribute this act to my prayers to God.I graduated from the University of Minnesota- Duluth with an English degree and a passion to write. I worked full time jobs and wrote on the weekends. I even kept a journal for a few years. In 1998, from a series of short stories based on experiences working at a health club, an obscure Canadian publication published “The Den of Antiquities” under the pen name M.B. Moshe.I wrote. . .and I wrote. I filled 3.5 floppies with text; fiction and vast catalogues of poetry. I look back now and see how I got tighter (in writing). I see how my writing pecked for, and finally found that voice that is imperative. I am always improving (you judge), finding the voice that is me, but still observant of my audience and their accessibilities.In 2011 I began writing about an incident I observed in a small local barber shop. An Orthodox Jewish man entered with his young son. He instructed the barber to take a little off the sides for his boy. From that happening, ideas surmounted, culminating into my first historical fiction novel, The Orthodoxy of Arrogance. I looked at some indie publishers and decided on one. The novel came on the market in January of 2013.When I was a single man, I traveled. I’d go to Europe and the Mid-east brash and free. Sometimes I bit off more than I could chew. In the spring of 2013 I published Scenes the Writer Shows {forty-one places a poem can go}, many of which are based on those travels.Now, at 50, I consider myself part of the comparatively small family of writers who follow only the direction of their muse. I have few commitments. For the foreseeable future, I have no intent of going back to the confines of a forty hour work week in the corporate game of drones. Slowly, with each publication, each tweet mentioned or morning haiku, I like to hope I am getting closer to not being.I published a second novel and poetry collection in 2014. I am currently compiling a memoir about growing up in the midst of the DFL (Democratic Farmer Labor) during the pivotal years of efforts to end the Vietnam War. I also published my third poetry collection in July of 2015. My published and unpublished work can be viewed at www.michaelpaulamram.weebly.com.

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