Play or Pay: A Novelette (1878)

Six billion people in the world, six billion different opinions of how the world is viewed out of oneas own environment. Steveas environment is not much different than a lot of others, except for the fact that by the age of five he had already experienced two heart attacks, and by age ten, he had one of the very first open-heart surgeries in the United States. When he entered his teenage years, he became a full-blown alcoholic before he turned fourteen years of age. This coupled with other dysfunctional problems was probably the reason Steve was granted a suspended ten-year prison sentence around his eighteenth birthday. What makes this authoras poems so unique is the fact that when he retired from the California Department of Corrections, he was a chartered member of their crisis response team, holding the position of primary negotiator. The poems in this book are a reflection of how this author viewed his world in his environments of dysfunction and success.