"Poems & Prose About Women Who've Hurt Me" is more about sweet memories than pain. Sometimes in life I am a professional actor. I am theater trained and have performed in nearly 40 theatrical productions on New York stages. Somewhere in my development, early on in my training on character development, I was told to bond with the characters pain first. Find that element of the character and you're almost there. As a poet, when I am moved to write, I fall in love with my subject. When the poem is done, when the music ends and the muse is gone, all that is left for me is the sweet pain of that memory as evidenced in poem or prose. There have been quite a few. I am especially moved by and drawn to the beauty of women. In a city like New York, filled with women from all parts of the planet an unassuming poet could easily fall in love 10 or more times a day. Just stand at the corner of Seventh Avenue & 37th Street at lunch time on any sunny summer weekday, and your eyes would move like a spectator at a tennis match. I guess that's another reason why I live in New Jersey. In my life I have both delighted and suffered through relationships, friendships, acquaintances, casual or brief encounters with all walks of beautiful women - the cashier at the corner deli, the blonde bombshell you stick your hand out to hold the elevator door for, the honey colored woman with flowing locks in Macy's fragrance area, or the stranger I shared my umbrella with on 8th Avenue one rainy day. These women have left lovely, indelible memories, footprints of beauty captured in the poems I have written in this book. They are a collection of secret admiration, tributes to loveliness, thank you for memories, and just plain old fantasy works, each with their own rhythm and patterns of passion.