OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT

The thing of it is, I don’t think I’ve let myself live the poet’s life (not that I’m sure what that is) although I recall pieces of my first poem, written when I was about eleven, living in Germany. It was something to do with sheep and pearls, from something I’d seen somewhere in the states or Germany, I don’t know which.

Sheep dotted the hillside,

like scattered white pearls

And there it is, that’s all I can recall. I have poems I wrote in my teens which are pretty awful – free verse – I thought I was ee cummings, without bothering to read or study much of the works. All written from a heart broken by my father’s death and my first lost love. But that was the beginning, for me, of poetry as a form of therapy. I avoided therapy, of course, too painfully revealing. And I didn’t share my poetry openly with anyone. Too painfully revealing. Also, I had a fear of being told how awful it was, not realizing how helpful feedback can be (from the right people), how it can make you learn and grow.

I got more serious with my poems after my second marriage broke down and up – this poem is about that – That First Morning – although I didn’t write it until now. And then I started writing about broken relationships, which (alas) seem to be about all of my love relationships, past present and future. I wish I loved you (which right now you can’t read, sorry), Tomb of the Abandoned woman Empty Eyes.

Now that my clock is running down, I wish I’d given more of my time, energy and attention to studying poetry, and to working more on writing it, rather than doing things like pursuing boys/men, spending time at jobs that were jobs, getting a degree in Business so I could spend more time at a job that was a job.

I’d would like to have spent more of my precious time with my kids, being poorer than I was (although there were food stamps and late fees, a threatened eviction, several years with no credit cards, so that’s poor enough). I could perhaps still have been selling baubles to booksellers (back when there were booksellers and not corporations hawking books) – instead of renting apartments or buying a house, I could have been living out of an RV, driving place to place, knowing many people, but not settling in one place. Perhaps I could have had thirty or forty years of that.

But that’s not to be My Poet’s Life, not this one anyway. Instead, as long as I can write and type and read, it appears it will be spent living in here (although seated mostly on my couch), until they put me in a nursing home, and I think my dreams are real.