Newly released!

About me

Hi, I’m Tros Mann—pronounced with a long O, like tone.

I was born in Texas in 1967, and I had a hard knock life, like a lot of people do. I was raised by a distant father and a mother who was never home because she had to provide for all of us.

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We moved constantly. Every six months, we were moving. My dad was always chasing a pipe dream, thinking he could make money doing something, but it always fell apart. My mom was always changing jobs. She started out as a candy striper.

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Eventually, we ended up in the Arizona desert. We broke down there in the middle of summer, forty miles from any town. We were homeless, living in a little van. Basically, we were camping. We didn’t know any better because we were kids. We were just stuck there.

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Eventually, we got a home, but family life was still pretty tough. Mom had to commute forty miles into Florence, Arizona, for work, and we were left with my dad.

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My dad was a man of very few words. There was something about him—I could feel the heat coming off him. He was a Vietnam veteran and a Korea veteran. He was in the Bay of Pigs. He had been Army and then Marines.

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My dad was abusive. Never to my mom that I saw, and never to my sister. But if he had a bad day, he took it out on me a lot.

I still have PTSD over things like that.

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I never wrote poetry in school. I was always a sensitive kid. I never got into fights unless I had to, but I did sports. I excelled in track, football, and karate, which I practiced for many, many years.

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Sports were the only way I felt I could stand out. I could outrun somebody. I could outlift somebody. Whatever it was, I could prove myself through it.

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The entire time, I was also trying to prove to my dad that I was a man—that I was good enough. It brings tears to my eyes even saying this, but he never got it.

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When I was bullied in Florence, I never stood down from a fight. I just got beat up a lot. I started taking karate in elementary school because it was offered there.

We lived forty miles from Florence. My sister and I walked four and a half miles from our desert property to the highway, where we met the school bus. We had to leave around five-thirty or six in the morning, in the dark, and follow a wash bed through the desert.

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When we got home around four-thirty in the afternoon, we walked all the way back.

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I absolutely loved it. The desert is part of what makes me me.

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In the 1990s, I became a singer-songwriter. I was in a Phoenix garage band called Wit’s End, and I wrote my own music. I was always doing something because I had to have an outlet to express myself.

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If I couldn’t express myself through sports or martial arts, I turned to art. I was always drawing dinosaurs, dragons, skulls, and things like that. I sang in school, too.

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A little-known fact is that I could never read music. To this day, if I can hear something, I can play it. I can play sitar, accordion, guitar, piano, banjo—whatever. I can figure it out, even if it is just twelve-bar blues.

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As I went on, I started writing compositions and songs. One piece I intentionally wrote as a song was called “Conquest.” It wasn’t a poem; it was a song. But I couldn’t find anyone who could play it because I couldn’t put it into tablature.

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We played some cover songs. “Hotel California” was one of them. Still, I never thought I could write poetry. I could write songs, but not poetry. Never in a million years did I think I would end up becoming a poet.

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Years later, I got out of the military after a short stint and received an honorable discharge. I taught karate in Phoenix for a while and earned my certification to teach.

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I got into drugs badly in the 1990s. I wasn’t using when I was in the band, although some of my bandmates were. At that time, I was still athletic-minded and living clean.

But later, I got wrapped up in drugs. During that whole blur of about ten years, there was no creative inspiration whatsoever. It was as if everything inside me had short-circuited. My drug of choice was crystal meth, and it fried all that creativity.

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I still had no idea that I would ever write poetry. I didn’t think I would ever be able to sing again. I figured those days were gone.

By the grace of God, I got out of all that.

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I lost a house. The whole story is struggle, struggle, struggle. I think a lot of my poetry reflects that struggle: get up, get knocked down, get back up, get knocked down. It is the grinding.

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My family and I ended up homeless. I lost everything except my son and my wife, and we were on the road. Eventually, we ended up in Mariposa, California.

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I had already gone through drug treatment. The honest reason I went through counseling was to keep my commercial driver’s license. I had been driving impaired for years and failing drug tests. It was a nightmare—ten years of a nightmare, pretty much.

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We ended up at my mom’s house, a tiny two-bedroom place. I was desperate and depressed over having nothing. I had built my family up and then lost everything.

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One day, I found a little orange Gideon’s Bible in my mom’s bathroom. I didn’t know anything about religion, the Bible, or Christianity, but I didn’t know what else to do. So I opened it and began reading.

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I was ashamed that I was hiding in the bathroom reading a Gideon’s Bible. I didn’t want my family to know how far down I was—flat on my back.

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About a year and a half later, I found the courage to tell my wife that this crackhead, crystal-meth junkie who had lost everything wanted to go to church.

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When we both got home from work, I said, “I don’t know anything about church. We’ve always been atheists in my family.”

I told my wife, “I think maybe we need this. We’ve tried everything else. Maybe this.”

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She said, “You’ll never believe it. I was at the bus stop this morning, standing next to the pastor’s wife while our kids got on the bus.”

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I thought, Holy moly.

I went to church scared to death. I didn’t know anything about church pews or what to expect. I was sweating. I was a wreck.

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But I went inside, heard the message, and felt inspired.

Eventually, I ended up on the worship team because I could sing.

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There was a moment when I knew I had become a Christian, and I could tell you when because of a poem I wrote in December 2003. It was called “Window Shopping.” It may still be in my archives somewhere, although I might have deleted it.

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“Window Shopping” was a story in poetry form. I discovered that I loved writing stories that way.

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I shared the poem with my pastor, and he was elated.

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“You’re a Christian poet,” he told me. “This is definitely a thing.”

Then I began producing more poetry. At first, it was all Christian-based, but it morphed.

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I started writing more prolifically, writing about what I saw. I used to make dairy deliveries, and I would see things at the dairy and write about them. I still didn’t think of it as poetry.

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I started writing stories. They just came to me. Anytime I had time on my hands, I was penning a story or a poem.

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I would notice something like the fingerprints of God while working in my garden: a butterfly landing on a flower, or some other little thing. Gradually, I began to realize, I’m writing poetry. There might be something to this.

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I didn’t think it was very good. I always said, “It’s real. To me, it’s not good, but it’s real.”

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If you want a real, down-to-earth perspective on the life around you—or the life around me—you can read these poems. They are for the common man, and they are by the common man.

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Don’t dress me up.

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Sometimes a poem comes out so freely and quickly that it surprises me. I never duplicate a poem. That’s hard to do when you have hundreds of them and use words like “you,” “fame,” or “he” multiple times without realizing it.

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Now, more than seven hundred poems later, I still write them in one take.

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There is no rhyme or reason to how they come. I never considered myself a poet. I was a storyteller who happened to rhyme his lines. I put stories together in rhyming form.

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People ask me, “How do you do it?”

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Sometimes I begin with only the title and have nothing behind it. A phrase like “Candle Flame,” “The Hammer to the Anvil,” or “Hammer and Anvil” will strike me, and I’ll think, That would make a good title.

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Sometimes I begin with one word—a single word. Sometimes I write backward, starting with the final verse and working my way to the beginning. Other times, an entire verse comes to me.

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I used to write everything on paper. Now I type it directly into Facebook and share it with the world. I am not a polished poet.

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A poem like “I Am” was hard for me to share. Even on Facebook, I said I had written it “for a friend” because it was difficult to let the world know that this tough guy—this athlete, truck driver, and whatever else people thought I was—sometimes believed he was nothing more than garbage.

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There was nothing anyone could have said that day to make him feel differently.

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But those poems speak to people.

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The hard thing about writing with allegory or double entendre is that one person will read it and say, “This doesn’t make any sense.” Then somebody else will say, “I know exactly what he’s talking about.”

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I write for those people.

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They may never know until they read it, but I write for the people who can say, “This guy put it into words. He hit the nail on the head.”