In his new collection of poetry, Requiem for a Snappy Dresser: Poems of Expiation and Conceit, author Nicholas Nicholas shares his attempt to reconcile his own life in terms of family, sex, love, loneliness, illness, death, and aging. This compilation of his work offers autobiographical, adult-themed poems, many of them explicit and on the subject of being gay. He presented some of these verses during his ongoing psychotherapy sessions in a Los Angeles, California Veteran’s Administration medical center, writing them as he fought paranoia, fear, disease, depression, and enormous self-doubt.
Nicholas considers these and other issues with often brutal candor, shocking irreverence, sensitivity, defiance, and surprising humor. He writes with honesty about the danger, loneliness, and pain of self-isolation. With this collection of poems, he hopes to provide others with insight, understanding, and maybe some compassion for all people—male or female, gay or straight—as they approach and experience their own inevitable final years of life.
One More Poem
One more poem to write
About the old man and the little boy
But the poem will write and right itself
My hand the aging instrument joining the two
It isn’t time quite yet
But soon the two must meet
Embrace
Merge
And move to life’s next place
A young boy’s resolution
On an old man’s wrinkled face
