Hemingway’s Shotgun

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.)