Reckless Ecstasy: A Life Of A Poet

I was born May, 30th 1989 at Wadley Medical in Texarkana, Ar. I was born to Kym Crispino from Queens, NY and William Lee of Hot Springs, Ar. My parents were young when they had me. We were very poor at times, but they always made sure I had what I needed. I was an only child, but grew up around plenty of cousins. I have lived in Texarkana my entire life. My parents split up when I was twelve, and my mother and I moved out into the country on a dead-end street with no children in the area, I became very sheltered and a little socially awkward.

I had been an only child for eight years so when my parents told me I was going to be a big sister I was shocked. I thought I was going to be an only child my whole life. It was normal for me to do things alone and I’m normally not thrilled about change but I was excited. We decided to name him Houston Michael Peters. He was originally supposed to be born on the thirty first of January, the same day as my dad. But he was born 2 days early on the twenty-ninth of January two thousand and fourteen and that's the day my life changed for the better.

In Percy B. Shelley essay, “A Defense of Poetry,” he states he view of how men take everything they are given, and use it to their best of their abilities. While in the novel, Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer talks about, how men go out to nature and treat it right; also how they incorporate integrity, dignity, and balance, when they do something in nature. Both men, state in their work, that men use what they are given and use these aspects to treat nature well. These aspects are what makes these two pieces of literature have some of the same meaning, and why they are so closely connected. Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer, and “A Defense of Poetry”, by Percy B. Shelley, have various correlations to which men show integrity, dignity and balance towards the aspect of nature; and how Chris embodies Shelley’s definition of poets.

At edge 38, I was on vacation in Hawaii when I suffered an injury while windsurfing. Unable to get in the water, I started scribbling notes and dialogue on a legal pad. That became my first book, “To Speak for the Dead,” which is still in print – at least digitally – 25 years later.

I was born in a small town in the middle of nowhere in a country known for poor life conditions. That place was Jerecuaro Guanajuato, Mexico, and being born there really didn’t mean much. My mother was a nineteen year old girl, and my father was an absent twenty year old. Not that he wanted to be absent. He was working you see far from home, in the U.S. Why though, well that was so my mom and I could eat. Which meant I could have a slightly better life.

January 31, 2006 I was blessed with my oldest daughter Amari and it was the happiest day of my life. Fast forward eleven years and three more children Antonio Jr, Amurryon and Aniya I am still the happiest man in the world. I had my children while I was young and I get to watch them grow as I continue to grow with them. Everything I have ever done has been for their happiness from joining the military to coming to Loyola to fulfill my degree.My youngest son Amurryon over time has aquired really bad Asthma and frequently sees his peditrician.I have been truly gifted with a great doctor for him and all of my children. My childrens doctor cares for them as if they were his own, he has watched them grow with me and they enjoy to see him as well.

Before I joined the military I was a reckless teenager who had no direction in life. Growing up in the slums of New York City my days consisted of stealing anything I could get my hands on, smoking weed, drinking and hanging out with my friends until the early hours of the night. My sense of accomplishment and achievement came from the fact I graduated high school. I cared for only myself and I wasn’t dedicated to anything that didn’t work in my favor. That all changed the day I enlisted in the United States Navy. Since that very first day of boot camp the military has had a positive effect on my life and changed me in so many ways.

The toll of war on my unit was not something that I understood until I was well into redeployment. I remember vividly the redeployment ceremony and all of the new gold star families (families who have lost a soldier) that were standing on the bottom of the bleachers. The Brigade Commander began to honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice and I broke down into tears. I watched how lost and torn apart those spouses, children, and parents were with their now incomplete family. Furthermore, they endured a grueling and at times hopeless twelve months of uncertainty and emotion, only to endure a total loss of love for the remainder of their lives. During the wounded warrior walk, after the ceremony I cheered on platoon, after platoon of amputees who were making their way through the streets of Fort Wainwright. Ultimately, everything was quickly put into perspective after these two events.

I was born on March 19, 1999 in Van Nuys, California. I was born into a family of four, one sister, one brother, and two parents. My family and I moved from California to Nevada when I was four years old after my dad received a job offer in Las Vegas. My youngest sister was born about a year after we moved to Las Vegas. I am very grateful to live in Nevada compared to California, because when my family visits California there is too much traffic, people, and the humid weather is horrible. The weather in Las Vegas isn’t that great as well since it is either too hot that your body feels like it is on fire or too cold that your body feels like a popsicle stick. As a result, I mostly stayed indoors where I turned to reading books. Throughout my earlier school years, I would be the kid who always carried around a book and read at any possible moment. My love of books made me want to write my own book. I quickly learned that writing a book is difficult, especially getting over writer’s block, and because of that most of my so called books failed.

Poetry is one of the oldest arts. Poems come in many forms from songs, ballads, and epics, to haikus. Many poets use elements like similes, metaphors, personification, rhymes, and imagery to get their themes or meanings across to the reader. In the poem “Schizophrenia”, Jim Stevens uses personification of the house to give the poem its overall meaning. Personification and symbolism are the most important poetic elements to “Schizophrenia” because they are used to describe how the house can never be the same after the effects of schizophrenia and how the house personifies and symbolizes a family and the person with schizophrenia.

For more than 200 years, clinicians have recognized the existence of individuals who did not fit the established categories of mental disturbances by failing to show remorse or an understanding of the severity of their conditions (Cleckley, 1982). For the next two centuries, researchers would subsequently refine this nomenclature by including various types of antisocial and criminal behaviors that were characteristic of mentally disturbed individuals. In his book, The Mask of Sanity (1982), though, H. C. Cleckley maintained that psychopaths were not necessarily the product of deprived lives in the early years, but suggested that people who have some of the characteristics of psychopathic behaviors do not have the requisite insight into their disorder or their personal state of well-being to recognize them (Raine, 1993). According to Gao and Glenn (2009), "Cleckley's book, The Mask of Sanity, provided the first and classic description and interpretation of psychopathy and theorized that this form of personality disorders may be due to a biological deficit" (p. 813).

Joining the Military was one of the most important choices of my entire life. It should of been an easy decision as most of my family have served in the military in some capacity but I struggled with it for far longer than expected. The two men I most respected in the world are my grandfather and adoptive father. My grandfather was an Army Ranger with 27 years in the service. He played for the army football team and I will always remember the pictures he had behind his big pink armchair of him in his old leather football gear as he would sit me on his knee and tell me stories. My father spent 21 years in the Army. He was in the Special Forces for 17 of them as an Weapons Sergeant and before that he was Airborne Infantry with the 82nd Airborne Division. Alot of the reason I joined was to get closer to the two of them. However, I did not want to be an infantryman so I enlisted in the

Keith Douglas says, “Remember me when I am dead and simplify me when I am dead,” yet remembering Keith Douglas’s life simplistically is a job not worth doing. Known as the best English war poet, Douglas was a poet during the Second World War. “From the age of fourteen he had been writing exceptionally accomplished poems, an early start which allowed him to get in a full ten years.” (Douglas) All along Keith Douglas has been in a poetry metamorphosis of inexplicable changes of state from love to loss, security to insecurity, cherished moments to sinister future.

People on the Edge in Poems: Stealing, Hitcher, Education for Leisure and Laboratory The four poems I chose were: Stealing, Hitcher, Education for Leisure and Laboratory. The themes in each were: stealing - insanity and theft, Hitcher - a hitchhiker and the truth, Education for Leisure - death and arrogance, and in the laboratory - eccentricity and paranoia. All of these poems deal with people on the edge. They all have people who inflict pain or damage for pleasure or amusement.

My entire life, my body, my heart felt as if I had gone into a free fall when I heard of my president of the South Vietnam government command us to give up and hand the weapons to the North Vietnamese, it felt like an atomic bomb exploded inside my head. For years I gradually got used to a new reality that my government lost the war, and I became a Vietnamese citizen of the second class.