I was a paramedic in the States for twenty years, and now writing poetry and novels.

How did I become to be a poet? In late 1985, a dying child, shot at point blank range by his father, asked one of my medics, "Why did my father shoot me?" She then closed her eyes and died, along with her sister, mother, and later her father, and soon all was forgotten, except the question no theologian, social scientist, psychologist or medic could answer.

Only the poet dare try.

Now, imagine, a career in which a man is in charge of over 200,000 EMS calls, with thousands like this? Let me jump to 1989, on Christmas Eve in Jersey City New Jersey, we get a call to transport a mother and her daughter, both infected with AIDS to the Emergency Room. I cannot forget the looks of both of them, especially the child as she smiled at me, her nose running, her face lanced with brown innocence and unknowing, that both would be dead before Easter.

 In order for me to keep from becoming another causality of war, I write, and many of my poems attempt to describe the heartbreak, addiction, the savagery and salvation of what I saw, and did not want to remember. My poetry is hard and blunt, not profane nor apologetic, but I sincerely believe that it is what Wilfred Owen says of poetry,

"That it should be of the truth and nothing less."