On the whole I would rather be in Philadelphia

W. C. Fields on his tombstone

I have been writing poetry since I was twelve years old, and within sight of where I am sitting at the moment are more than seventy-five notebooks full of poems. When I returned to the United States from Vietnam in March of 1966 I spent at least fifteen years–in the words of Bryon–being mad and bad and dangerous to know. I suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, a malady that could not then be named–for a few years I had an almost terminal case of it. Crime, drugs, chopped reality, fast motorcycles, women, rum and cocaine, all of these just about killed me. I went to prison for a while. Through all of that I never stopped writing poetry, even if some of my poems from those times are as dreadful as the years themselves were.

I live a life now I could once only dream of, I got and stayed sober, I stopped being a thug and a lout. I have been mentored and taught what it is to be a man–and to be a good man at that. I have long known that it’s not what we say we are that makes us who who are, but what we do.

Each poem in Disconnected Memories is a response to something that happened in my life, so you could say, in a way, that they are autobiographical. Some of the poems are quite old, some are quite new, but that’s unimportant. What matters to me is what you, the one reading my words, makes of these fragments of a life.

Dominic Albanese is an American poet, mechanic and Vietnam War veteran. He has published five previous books of poetry: Notebook Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2014), Bastards Had the Whole Hill Mined (Les ditions du Zaporogue, 2015), Iconic Whispers (Les ditions du Zaporogue, 2015), Then n Now (Les ditions du Zaporogue, 2016), Only the River Knows (Les ditions du Zaporogue, 2018). Dominic lives in Florida