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. Harry kindly provided the Preface to the First Edition of Mr. Bukowski’s Wild Ride.)