April is National Poetry Month. I shall post poetry. I love poetry.

In high school I got involved with our literary club. Meetings were fun - we all wrote on some topic the club leaders came up with and then shared. I met the creative people, the weirdos, the folks far smarter and more talented than me. I wanted to write like that. I tried, and failed. Even though I eventually became Editor-in-Chief (I'm that person that rises to responsibility because no one else will) I never became a good writer in the creative arts (I can rock a research paper, though). I had fun, though, creating weird short stories about a sleepwalker and books that fought back. I wrote poems about coffee and heroin overdose that were actually published in the magazine.
Being an editor for two years exposed me to the core of high school lit mag hell - bad teen love poems. Really. We'd meet at someone's house to go through the piles of submissions, sorting poetry, prose, and art into piles of great, good, please burn. These were fun times - reading the worst we could find out loud so everyone could share in the torturous pain, pointing out how many were written in some neon gel pen. Forced awkward weir rhymes flowed like cottage cheese over rocks. Piles of them. Like American Idol, we tossed the middle bad early and kept the worst to share with friends. Cruel to the writers? Perhaps. But I like to think that those people grew up, laughed at themselves, and vowed never to write poetry ever again.


http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/41