i do eat a peach, i eat all the time

it's national poetry month, which is all well and good but to me, and probably to you as well, every month, hell, everyday is poetry day. do you do as i do and think about it even when you are not consciously thinking about it. do you watch movies, look at paintings, make a meal, eat your food, engage in all your senses five, use your critical thinking skills and even when you flatline in front of the tv, do you do as i do and still think about poetry, as a writer and reader?

which means that i'm not going to engage in the writing a poem a day exercise. not that there's anything at all wrong with writing a poem a day. this week i've been working 10-11 hrs days and coming home zonked out. i still think about poetry. no matter how exhausted i get i read poems all the time. i mean all the time. when i read i mean. not all the time like when i'm driving or doing my dayjob which this week i've been working 10-11 hrs days.

to paraphrase basho even reading poems, i hear the poems cry. i'm thinking how i can use this or that technique or subject or you name it in poems. i'm sure you do the same. i'm writing even when not writing. alex gildzen posted a terrific essay of his life in poetry here. i second his emotion. i've received this week three poems he'd just composed based on a recent trip to las vegas and alex's poems are brimming with life, eroticism and the love of words. reading them makes me happy to be alive.

that's what poetry does for me, makes me happy that i'm alive. i don't care for fame, fortune [there ain't any in poetry, and for that i'm grateful as hell, really i am] but only to live my life in the service of my art just because it illuminates me and makes me happy. there are very many who don't know what to do with their lives and therefore unhappily exist. i do not make any claims of superiority at all or even sound like i'm gloating. far from it. as duncan mcnaughton wrote in a poem about the poet's life, ours is the cheapest in the world. but i know what i want from life and know what i want to do in my life. it is to live in the world of words. i do that, and i've been lucky enough thus far to do just that, i'll die a very happy man.