Mysterious Visitors

A year ago tomorrow I wrote this poem about the Three Kings.  I thought at the time, it was pretty good, and I’m surprised that it’s gotten less attention than it has;  this time of year, people go looking for poetry for Epiphany, and they read this one… and they keep looking.  I find myself wondering if it’s getting read as part of a sermon or some symposium on the “meaning of Epiphany”, and no one’s bothering to tell the author.  Forty sets of eyes in the last couple of weeks, and no one bothers to send a note?

Oh, well. Welcome to the modern Internet, where if I violate your copyright protections, it’s the end of the world; but if you violate my copyright protections, it’s “well, it’s fair use and you shouldn’t have put it on the internet if you didn’t want it used.”

The thing is, I did want it used, and I do want it used.  Poets want their work out in the public eye. Not necessarily in the public domain, but in the public eye.  And they’re not the same thing at all.  Mysterious visitors, indeed.

Time was when I could only get my friends to read my writing.  I’d hand around paper manuscripts of things, or I’d go to coffee houses and stand on stage and read something aloud, and half the time someone would say a kind word or two, along the lines of “that was really deep, man,” and that would be the end of it. (Sometimes we applaud because the poem is good, and sometimes because it’s over.)  Now?

Now, only strangers read my writing.  I’ve met TieAndJeans, and Radioactive Art, and a couple of my other readers in person, but mostly they’re mysterious strangers.  I think one of my goals is to meet some of the bloggers that I read, both in teaching and in the occult spheres, and get a sense of their darshan.  I hope that we’ll have a chance to meet.

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