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Poems by Mark J. Halliday

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Poems

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Date PostedPoemTitle# ViewsForm  
09/04/2024317 Rhyme
05/31/2024394 Lyric
05/15/2024349 Alliteration
05/14/2024441 Sonnet
02/15/2024381 Etheree
12/15/2023627 Lyric
10/13/2023248 Prose
09/12/2023377 Rhyme
05/19/2023637 Rhyme
03/06/2023998 Haiku
02/09/2023609 Sijo
09/23/2022495 Clerihew
03/08/2022456 Lyric
02/23/2022704 Pleiades
02/15/2022433 Narrative
01/30/2022428 Senryu
01/30/2022516 Lyric
12/25/2021422 Rhyme
12/23/2021464 Lyric
05/16/2021411 Free verse
04/19/2021495 Lyric
04/17/20211031 Ghazal
04/17/2021612 Villanelle
04/03/2021655 Alliteration
03/23/2021444 Tanka
03/19/2021784 Haiku
03/02/2021460 Haiku
02/24/2021434 Haiku
02/23/2021376 Haiku
02/21/2021764 Sonnet
02/20/2021464 Nonet
02/19/2021607 Sonnet
02/13/2021419 Free verse
02/13/2021961 Diamante
02/13/20211445 Diamante
02/02/2021577 Sonnet
01/30/20211300 Pantoum
12/20/2020784 Lyric
01/10/2020577 Lyric
08/20/2019768 Free verse
05/24/2019493 Lyric
02/24/20191740 Lyric
02/24/2019654 Haiku
02/22/20191799 Lyric
02/11/2019631 I do not know?
02/03/2019495 Senryu
02/03/2019559 Lyric
01/26/2019768 Lyric
01/23/2019884 Narrative
01/23/2019719 Enclosed Rhyme
01/15/20191545 Lyric
01/14/2019775 Bio
01/14/2019852 Rhyme
01/13/2019682 Rhyme
01/10/2019573 Fibonacci
01/08/2019817 Sonnet
12/31/2018870 Lyric
12/30/2018595 Monoku
12/21/20181150 Lyric
12/21/2018649 Monoku
12/19/2018740 Lyric
12/18/2018847 Lyric
12/16/20181290 Lyric
12/15/2018641 Lyric
09/28/2018532 Rhyme
06/29/2018536 Lyric
06/29/2018592 Lyric
06/03/20181297 Free verse
04/17/20181092 Verse
04/08/2018518 Lyric
09/06/2017917 Lyric
08/22/2017827 Haibun
06/29/2017905 Pantoum
06/20/20171115 Lyric
04/21/2017923 Lyric
10/28/2016947 Senryu
10/14/20162811 Lyric
09/08/2016848 Lyric
08/11/2016847 Lyric
07/22/20161292 Lyric
07/12/20161055 Lyric
07/08/20163181 Lyric
07/06/2016880 Lyric
06/28/20161028 Lyric
06/27/2016914 Lyric
06/22/2016800 Triolet
06/13/2016827 Lyric
06/11/20161139 Lyric
05/16/20161148 Lyric
05/08/2016949 Lyric
04/17/20162360 I do not know?
04/06/20161302 I do not know?
04/03/20161023 Couplet
03/30/20161480 I do not know?
03/21/20161143 Haiku
03/21/20161124 Lyric
01/25/20163928 Couplet
01/15/20161661 Quatrain
12/31/20151408 Shadorma
12/28/20151037 Senryu
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Biography

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My Name is Mark Halliday (Staff Sergeant, US Army Retired). 
I grew up in Garden Grove, California.  I had piano lessons as a kid, and played flute in marching bands for 4 years. My first college attended was Santa Ana College, which was interrupted for two years while I served as a Mormon missionary in north-eastern France and southern Belgium.  While finishing my first AA in Liberal Arts, I played keyboard synthesizer with my friends in a band that focused on Beatles songs, surfer music, oldies, and pop songs from the 80s.  I started learning to play guitar around 1985.

Besides being involved in music, I also like to draw.  Often my pictures have the same theme as my lyrics or poetry.  I have a series of drawings of musical instruments in fantasy/science fiction settings, for example a picture of a bass guitar fighting off biplanes from on top of the Empire State Building (based on the original film King Kong), and others of primitive man surrounding a giant set of keyboards (similar to the opening of 2001 A Space Oddessey).

My favorite hobby is reading.  I especially like military-science-fiction writers such as David Weber, David Drake, John Ringo, and Eric Flint.  I'm also fond of books by Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Tom Clancy, Harold Coyle, Harry Turtledove, Frank Herbert, Ian Fleming, W.E.B. Griffin, Clive Cussler, Jack Higgins, Arthur C. Clark, Jim Butcher, George R. R. Martin, and writers for Star Wars novels such as Kevin Anderson.
 
I enlisted in the US Army (1987) near the end of the Cold War to be an Intelligence Analyst/Russian Linguist.  I later cross-trained into the Serbian and Croatian languages during the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts, and spent time with UN Peacekeepers in Macedonia.  I also spent a year in Mosul, Iraq, helping train the Intelligence section of an Iraqi infantry battalion staff. I spent about a third of my service time in Germany, as well as Missouri, California, Texas, Massachusetts, Arizona, and Maryland.  I taught Russian, then Serb-Croatian, then French at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC) in Monterey, California, where I finally retired in 2007. 

I met my wife Nelly while visiting Paris, France, during the bicentennial of Bastille Day in 1989 (see my quatern poem A Soldier's Foreign Woman).  We have two sons.  We are still together, and happily still best friends.

While still in the Army, I earned an AS in Ornamental Horticulture at Monterey Peninsula College (and have enough credits for another in Business Administration), and a BS from Excelsior College in Liberal Arts with an emphasis on European languages and culture.
I work full time as an Army civilian Supply Technician at the DLIFLC in Monterey, and for a few years on call as a commercial charter bus driver for a company in Marina CA (see my poem The Butterfly Flutters by).  I've been learning bass guitar the last few years and also using a keyboard workstation.  I'm slowly learning to record my songs on computers, too.

This is how I got into poetry.  I was 'in-like' with one of my French converts back in the 80s; she sent me a poem or two, so I reciprocated and started writing sonnets and songs (see my lyric Odessey), ever since about 1983.  Today my normal focus is on writing songs instead of poems, so in a sense many of my recent poems are ideas that I could not easily make into lyrics....not quite failures per se, but not successful towards my first priority.  As of this writing (January 2015), I am working on recording my songs Tropical Getaway, Something you Left Behind, Egyptian Dancer, Lady Luck Stomped Out, and the children's song Blow More Bubbles.

My dream is to create a band called the Retropolitan Underground, which plays new songs using older musical styles, probably heavily into old pop-jazz fusions.  We just bought an older quaint house in Salinas, California, near Hartnell College.  I want to apply some of my education and skills to upgrade the house, by 1) turning my garage into a home music studio, 2) organically growing vegetables and fruit trees everywhere around the house with enough sunlight, and 3) painting some murals inside.  So far I'm working on an image of a pergola covered with flowers in the master bedroom.

 


Book: Reflection on the Important Things