My latest book of poems, Your]Eyes Were Oyster Shells is a metaphorical web on beauty and strong emotional issues like love, hate and other topics that draw the heart into a dance of joy or melancholy.

Your Eyes Were Oyster Shells is my fifth published collection of poems. Following on the heels of his last love-poem collection, Pearls, I spin words into relatable imagery, smooth diction, rhythmic style to relate his poetic narratives. Beauty has always been a source of inspiration for me.

Poems in Your Eyes Were Oyster Shells are my deep philosophies on BEAUTY and its related issues, like ATTRACTION, IMPERFECTION, LOVE, HEARTBREAK, HAPPINESS, FEAR, and what lies between life and death. However, these topics were really not the only subjects that I was passionate about at the time of writing them, but were the ones that poured ink from my pen.

Like in my last two collection of poems, Pearls and Reign of Hyenas, I lean on the use of figurative language, metaphor and simile above others, not to create complex structure in my poems nor to provide diverse insights but to create vivid imagery to drive home my messages. The purpose is to carry my readers along as I communicate through poetic imagery.

The use of language in the collection, though figurative, not without the enriching depth of allusion, referencing well-known characters from the bible and other works of literature, history and popular culture, envelopes everyday words that buy and sell at the market; you don’t need editorial footnotes to understand them. The compelling diction of these poems isn’t to be found in any sort of elaborate words but metaphorical elusiveness as with the majority of my poems. It is creatively and beautifully as demonstrated while exploring the theme of lasting beauty in the poem, True Beauty:

‘While beauty is joy
And sweet to behold,
True beauty doesn’t idle
Only as pedals in the sun
Or finch over the ground
But hides far away
In the deep as coral reef
Or the bowels of earth
As rubies and diamonds
And demands the courage
Of daring hearts
Of Napoleon and Edward
To cut through the ice
Surface of the deep
Or burrow hard ground
To grasp and behold
Its joy and sweetness’


Reading through poems in Your Eyes Were Oyster Shells is taking a walk through a rich garden of words. It is one of the closest guises of bond a reader can have with a poet.

In preparing this collection, I present my poems in a straight and accessible language that could be understood in its ordinary sense. My primary intention is for readers to find my contents appealing, interesting and engaging.