Life Poems

By Danny Ray Christian

The tragic incident of my thirty-years untreated mental illness had made me attempted to kill someone close to me which taught me that out of the greatest pain can come the greatest beauty. All of the poems in this book were written while I was in the mental hospital being treated for my mental illness, and prove to me that What Satan meant for evil, God can and does use for good. I was out of my mind when I committed the act of attempted murder, yet the worse day of my life became the turning point when I awoke to the fact that I needed to first surrender to God and then ask Him for direction and purpose for my life. That prayer was answered through me discovering that I had a talent for writing poetry and motivational speaking while in Elgin Mental Health Center from 20032013. These poems are not the mad ramblings you would expect from the criminally insane, but are the personal expressions of deep pain and revelations of a man who awoke from a state of apathy to a new world of love and beauty. I hope that all those who read these poems will come to understand that the bitterest lemons can be turned into the sweetest lemonade, if you are willing to look at life and your experience through different glasses than those you have seen its pain and ugliness through.

Danny has been certified by Toastmasters International as a competent public speaker (1991 East Moline). He received his GED from the Chicago City Colleges (1981) and obtained a certificate in graphic arts from Southeastern Illinois College (1987). He is a former member of the Pan-African Revolutionary Socialist Party. He spent twenty years in prison and ten in Elgin Mental Health Center. While in the hospital he wrote over eight hundred poems, three books of daily meditations, and numerous speeches and Afrocentric anecdotes. He also acted as a mentor for younger consumers while there, leading his own peer-support groups and chairing GROW for four years (200307). He has been clean of all illegal drugs and alcohol for fourteen years.

His mission is to be the most infectiously optimistic and exceptionally giving person possible and to encourage others to be equally optimistic and giving. Danny is not one who believes you cant make it because you have some strikes against you; he is one to tell you that, Anything you can conceive and believe you can achieve (Napoleon Hill).

You can post comments on my e-mail at [e-mail].

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514474730

Danny Ray Christian

Danny has been certified by Toastmasters International as a Competent Public Speaker (1991 East Moline). He received his GED from the Chicago City Colleges (1981) and obtained a certificate in Graphic Arts from Southeastern Illinois College (1987). He is a former member of the Pan-African Revolutionary Socialist Party. He spent twenty years in prison and ten in Elgin Mental Health Center. While in the hospital he wrote over eight-hundred poems, three books of daily meditations, and numerous speeches and Afro-centric anecdotes. He also acted as a mentor for younger consumers while there, leading his own peer-support groups and chairing GROW for four years (2003-07). You can contact him about appearing at your venue at [e-mail]

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Copyright © 2016 by Danny Ray Christian.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 03/15/2016

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

Life as Poetry

A Tearful Start To Fall

A Long Afternoon

Without Calling It by Name

Catch of the Day

Things That Answer the Soul’s Calling

Indemnity Shed

Life as Poetry

Places and Place

The Day Nothing Happened

Pacing

On The Edge

My Window

Passing Through

Spirit

The Silver Thread

Rhetoric

Pestered with Self

Light on the Eternal Question

A Night Questioned

Between the Days

People and the World

Still in Bed at Ten

Weather Report

The Shield of a Gray Day

Pliancy between Pages

How Alive Am I

When I Think About Home

Down Here

Starved to Partiality

Broom

BOOK TWO

Song of a Juju Man

Blue Sadness

Song of a Juju Man

Assassin Blues

As the Night Kindles

Daisy Fields Plotting My Mind

Green or Blue in Green

When Laughter Was Cheap

A New Therapy

My Corner of the Sky

As I Listened for My Future on a Monday

The Mortar Scene Outside My Window and The Casket Within

She Held a Beetle by a String in Summer

Regimenting a Riot

John Coltrane

Cold

Drive Until You Lose the Road

Moon Stuck and Stick

Something More Solid

Big Boy Finds His Shadow

We Need Magic

The Temple Dancers

Tell Me a Story

Troubled Beginning in Poetic Regalia

All Too Soon

Poetic Anxiety

Around the Corner of Night

Hey You

A Cartoon Something or Other

If You Are Dinner

August 7, 2010

My Last Piece of Change

The Makings of You

What I Know

Soft Hurts

On The Corner/New York Girl/Thinking One Thing and Doing Another (Miles Davis)

Fisherman, Strawberry, and Devil Crab (Miles Davis)

Poetic Duality

BOOK THREE

Small Hours

Evil

Allowed Escape

Shadow Self

The Art

Unbroken

Trouble Sleeping

Finding Myself

Rot in My Gut

Waiting It Out

Getting it In

As if

Keen to the Silence’s Pain

Heir to Error

My Take

Standing in On A Dream

Satchel of Hoarded Nights, Winters and Hearts

December Night

What You’ve Done

Aspen Ship

In The Middle of Life

The Emergency of Tending the Moment

Education in Absent Things

A Poignant Possessiveness

Random Message

The Books She Read

Flirtatious Trap

Nameless Survivor

It is Not So

Drunk in Dr. Woo’s Bar

Never as Lost

As Time Goes By

Poetry’s Shield

Poverty and Poetry

Two Steps Above Heaven and a Heart Beneath Hell

My Place of Favorite Escape

The Elemental Cabinet

Dedicated

To all those on lockdown in prison and the mental hospital and who have yet to discover their gift and find their muse. May they also one day get a second chance at life.

Book One

Life as Poetry

A Tearful Start To Fall

The first day of Autumn appeared as

a wakeful tear outside my window.

The clouds made for a gloomy harvest

of my eye ducts which washed

the auburn scene developing in the mist.

The haze of the sky was such that just

looking at it moistened my eyes with

saline solutions of bitterness.

The condensation of my view of the

as yet rustic trees spread a granny

quilt over my feel for September’s

chilly days.

While the walls of the sanitarium kept

me warm and dry, secure from the pending

deluge of rain, I was sundered with the

desire to foil its bucolic blanket of the

atmosphere.

With a mist of gray dangling in the air,

as I squirreled away the morning listening

to smooth j azz and reading poetry, it felt

as though fall was surely bound to be a

season ofbroken and frigid hearths.

I was soaked with longing for a fortnight

amid Afghans and hot toddies, so that

I could find comfort among Autumn’s

flannel days of leaf-rustling walks.

September 22,2009

A Long Afternoon

Sitting, as my father had on many a

Sunday afternoons in a recliner,

I count up the straw that has

gone into the construction of

such a languid day.

I wonder which god or slave

had to pay the price for my leisure

and respite from the rat race, forced

though it may be.

It prick my interest to know how

the serene faith of a Sunday hymn

escapes the chortled spirit to

rest on the sill of barred windows.

How such rich afternoons come

at the cheap cost ofjust living

perplexes me beyond the rendering

of a guess at any person’s ability to

fully appreciate the relaxing of life’s

demands.

The benefit of a brief spat of listening

to jazz and sipping coffee is beyond payment.

Such lazy days do not come by our

pardonable sloth, but must be accredited

to life’s weariness, which need to find

some way station to rest from its

languorous march to eternity.

But with the sun settled in the sky

and my maniacal chores of poetry

writing done, I take in the day’s

lassitude with the resolve to anchor

at this oasis, knowing that there is

more desert to cross tomorrow.

Without Calling It by Name

(Ecclesiastes 3:11)

how do you identify the thing

which drives you to place a

marker in the book to note your

place?

Who is to say where we should be

in the story, or with what diction

it should be told.

Surely we are at a disadvantage to

be able to call our