Duane Locke

Duane Locke, Ph. D. in Renaissance Literature, now lives alone in an old, decaying, two-story house in the sunny Tampa Slums. The esthetic effects of the police have recently mitigated the egregious ugliness of the neighborhood. The police have pasted bright yellow and orange posters on every pole. The colorful posters advertise that the location is a shopping mall for drugs, and proclaim, "no loitering," thus everyone jogging enlivens the motion of the neighborhood.

All the joggers carry cell phones. The drabness of the beer bottle littered streets is mollified by the brightness of the expensive cars, stolen, stripped, and abandoned. The place is something of a poor man's Las Vegas for there are crap games in every driveway.

Duane lives here as a stranger and alien, for he knows no one, does not understand the customs, the costumes, and the language, some form of postmodern English. He has had over 2,000 poems published in print magazines such as APR, Nation, Literary Quarterly, Black Moon, Bitter Oleander; but he is not sure he has any reader for it seems no one reads poetry in print magazines. His 14th and latest book of poems is "Watching Wisteria", available from www.vidapublishing.com.

duanelocke@netzero.net

1................... Chiarra, I had High Desires
2....................................................... Somewhere In Italy
3.......................... Confession of a Scholar