Michael Philip Castro

Lookout Poet of North Central Florida's Osceola National Forest. Born in the Culver City Hospital across the street from MGM Studios as Hollywood's Golden Age roared like Leo the Lion. I now find myself seven decades later out here "Salingered" in my bunker where resettled since October 2019 in these Wilds mere months before Operation Covidiocy hit every city, every town — burnt their bridges to the ground — on my heels after I, as mentioned, had... what?... fortuitously? instinctively?... E S C A P E D. Along with my wife Erin's ashes under one arm and her lingering lapdog, Shamrock, under the other for luck, we resettled... amongst deer and wild turkeys, canopied by long leaf pine and maple gum that shake loose in a wind red cardinal and woodpecker between the old Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Beach, Florida, just south of Georgia in what locals call the Gateway, "where a man can think it through."

Latest release... MAN DATE: THE BEFORE & AFTER TIMES; New & Select Typoetics, 1993 to 2023 (OpPRESS, June 2025 Edition).

This collection survived at least three hurricanes and more tropical storms over its 5-year composition with new (2023) and selected pieces previously published over last 3 decades recommissioned into an epic narrative sympathetic, I believe, with "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower," as OG Dylan T once put it. In the forest, in this Church of the Assissi, we sylvans don't pave over effusions like that with a wave of the hand. Out here, we wave off and pave over very little when at all. Everything's taken into consideration. Maybe that's why I like it out here. It's conducive, these Outlands.

But before you bring this MAN DATE Outsider into your home, gentle reader, a caveat— or a pledge...

"Not your Spitalfields silk," *

~Michael _ AUG 10, 2025

* Herman Melville's self-review after a New Englander lady inquired as to what his Moby Dick was all about.