Someday I’ll take the Shirt off my Back

or what if poetry is a game show with no host?

I sought professional help. I suspect some of you wondered what took so long, but admitting I need therapy more than careful editing took some doing. Had to look in the mirror with the lights on and realize I’ve been chasing the wrong ghost image around in my blockheadia. I signed up for a poetry workshop that promised to be fun. Fun? I rejected that notion. I was paying for this, or at least my sponsor was and I wanted fame and fortune as a return on the risk to reward ratio.

Smart aleck me got challenged to define such goals as an attainable standard. In other words as a poet what would pass for fame, for fortune. I’m fortunate enough to be a poet in the first place so expanding that notion into something measurable seemed to go against some esoteric principle I probably picked up like a hitchhiker with an odor that lingered long after the drop off. I couldn’t put my finger on it but I knew something was inhibiting both my imagination and my impact. What would poetic success look like if it met me on the street of my dreams?

After forty plus years of being satisfied writing with a few friends in mind and a few more future friends in the front row at the open mic in town I began to submit poems to literary journals and anthologies I came across rather haphazardly on the…