A Life Without Money and other poems

What Perry says about his newest book, A Life Without Money:

"It is (OK, I have to say this) a book of poetry. I know. You hate poetry. Can't stand the stuff since you were forced to read Longfellow in Jr high. But this is poetry for people who either can't stand poetry but appreciate the rhythm of life, or people who really feel that rhythm and want to read how it works. Because that is what good poetry is about: The rhythm of life. And, A Life Without Money is the perfect example of it. It starts with a slam-bang.

You’re alive and every pore of you

is open to those possibilities, fantastic

calibrations of a world that won’t

end with you, but will go on

in its illusions, while you watch amazed,

beguiled as a four year old

learning to attach signs to meaning,

but of you—what can you attach to make

your own yearnings succeed in the wreck

of reality—you now in this elixir of euphoria

arising in its adrenalized fury to the very edge

of hysteria—how could you help it, and why?

We've all been there, that moment when you become alive to your own life, when you are being driven by the pleasure of existence—until an icy splash of reality is thrown in your face, and from then on you have to survive—at work, with your clueless family, with friends who barely know you. A Life Without Money is about that survival, until it hits you that you can survive on your own terms. You can do it, if you are willing to fight, and put up with enough shit to do it—and then throw the shit aside . . . and that becomes "a life without money."

I talk about a lot of things in this book: about the tragedy of young cops mowed down in the best of good intentions; about the fragility of planet Earth and our own lives on it; about life and death in New York and the rest of America; about aging, and love, and sex and music and magic. That is what poetry is supposed to be about—sex and music and magic. And everything else important between the three of them."

Cover painting detail by Jack Balas.

Available on Amazon or buy it directly from the author.

A Life Without Money, now available on this website, Amazon, & Other Platforms 85 pages, $14.95 ISBN: 978-1-892149-38-1