It Seems Only Yesterday I Used To

I Thought Originally When I Was In School And I Wanted To Be A Poet, I Knew That Poets Seemed To Be Miserable.

I Stared Up At The Ebbing Quarter Moon And The Stars Scattered Like A Handful Of Salt Across The Faraway Sky.

A Trouble With Poetry Is The Presence Of Presumptuousness In Poetry, The Sense You Get In A Poem That The Poet Takes For Granted An Interest On The Reader's Part In The Poet's Autobiographical Life, In The Poet's Memories, Problems, Difficulties And Even Minor Perceptions. I Try To Presume That No One Is Interested In Me. And I Think Experience Bears That Out. No One's Interested In The Experiences Of A Stranger - Let's Put It That Way. And Then You Have Difficulty Combined With Presumptuousness, Which Is The Most Dire Trouble With Poetry.

And I Should Mention The Light Which Falls Through The Big Windows This Time Of Day Italicizing Everything It Touches.

Listeners Are Kind Of Ambushed... If A Poem Just Happens To Be Said When They're Listening To The Radio. The Listener Doesn't Have Time To Deploy What I Call Their 'poetry Deflector Shields' That Were Installed In High School - There's Little Time To Resist The Poem.