“Back From The Dead” by Harry Calhoun
I keep a picture on my desk
from 23 years ago
a photo of myself at the typewriter
sitting at an old metal desk
in an attic apartment with plaster patches
on the sloping walls
I look 15 and geeky at 31
and I wonder if I was happy
and as I remember I wasn’t
all those years I wasted depressed
and now, older and living in comfort
I’m happy, but the comfort has little
to do with it. My wife and my dog
have a lot to do with it. And a while back
I Googled my name to find
there are a lot of my old poems out there
in little magazines on rare book sites
but I lost some poems to flooding
and a hard drive gone bad
and I got discouraged
and I started thinking my writing at work
was enough
but something about that photo
and stumbling on bukowski.net
and surprised to find that people knew my name
I realize that
I’m not Whitman
I’m not Frost
and I’m certainly no Bukowski
but unlike an NFL running back
whose average career is four and a half years
I have as long as I live to catch up
I’m not Bukowski
but I’m writing again
and what I am is
back
(Harry Calhoun has been published all over the place but you’d probably only recognize a few of them — Writer’s Digest and the National Enquirer, for instance. He has found frequent editorial favor as a poet in small-press magazines since 1980, edited a poetry magazine, and had a lot of freelance articles and literary essays published in the 80s and 90s.)
Pricks and vain bastards
the first full moon
His stone stands stoic, crowded and gray,
High school
you need to
Gin limber, she lies on her tummy
Never thought of poetry as