Sometimes he wonders why he
writes poetry, and then he re-
members all the laborious re-
search papers he had to write and

then it’s a no brainer. People,
who don’t write poetry, tell him
it is so hard to write poetry and
poetry is so hard to understand

and so they don’t bother with
poetry. While he would love to
wallow in that comment about
the difficulty of writing poetry,

the fact is that it is like one
of his favorite professors who
said he teaches English because,
while he has tried all kinds of

things to do, teaching English
is the easiest and most enjoyable
thing his teacher has ever done.
And he was so good at it — a

born teacher with a calling to
teach, a vocare. A born poet with
a vocare? Oh, how he would wallow
for a while in that and, of course,

let people think it is so really
hard to do and so deep and so
hard to understand, but then he
thinks about Billy Collins and how

much fun writing poetry obviously
is for Collins and how his poems
are so approachable and enjoyable
to read and so understandable

and therefore according to popular
thought, for those afore-mentioned
reasons, actually they are comp-
licated, deeply existential, phil-

osophical, psychological, with
obscure spiritual meaning under-
stood only by the gnostic few.
Nah.