In many ways The East Deck Motel and Selected Poetry is a poetic memoir. The poetry within this book is derived from personal life experiences over the past forty years. These experiences can roughly be separated into three chapters - as a young adult in Eastern Long Island, as a physician in middle life and then, later in life, as a father watching my children mature into young adults themselves. Through medical school and 30 years of private practice I have been confronted with life and death on a frequent basis. This time of my life provided me with a perspective of people perhaps not available to those outside of the medical community. My intent in writing this book is to show people life from an angle that they have not viewed before. This poetry is meant to be entertaining and in some ways informative. As a physician the seriousness of life confronts me on a regular basis and I have had to find ways to laugh at life in order to reach a comfortable balance. What is written here is a natural extension of my everyday life-the dark side of life is often reflected in a humorous way, and events that might at first appear joyful do not have a happy ending. This is a poetic memoir with an ironic twist.