When Kat Comes Home

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

When Kat Comes Home

The digital desk clock winks at me.

The doorbell chimes a tune.

Its ringing sings, “You’re not alone.”

I hear the racket of a key,

So fancy free

That turning key.

What joy to think that I’ll say soon,

“My Kitten’s home!”

The door draws back. Light frolics in.

Who’s there? I think I’ll guess.

But what appears is too well known:

An impish face with girlish grin.

The sun rays spin.

I look again.

What joy to see such loveliness!

My Kitten’s home!

I pounce on her like a wildcat will

And grasp her like a treat.

Her eyes shine bright. Our love has grown.

I kiss and kiss and kiss her still.

Oh, what a thrill

To love my fill!

What joy to know my life’s complete:

My Kitten’s home!

My Kitten’s home!

My Kitten’s home!

For Katherine Lynne Wheeler, my beloved finacée and almost wife

December 10, 2007

[Rich Engle]

I know the feeling.

Happy BD, (Michael's) Kat! I told him to spend at least 500.00 on you. Hope that was sufficient...

rde

At Least We Have Cellphones and Internet During Long Separations

[Philip Coates]

That was a nice, warm poem

A gift that never wears out

It's in your heart wherever you roam

Breakage or lack of a battery won't make you pout

It's not physical - it's built to last

It's spiritual - you can nail it to the mast

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I had a funny thing happen with this poem.

As I have mentioned in several places, I have been studying Internet marketing. Fortunately I am aware that failure is an integral part of learning (if you never fail at something, you don't need to learn it), so I don't get discouraged with any steep learning curve. But sometimes I have to kick myself for the nature of the failure. I mean, there are standards of dumb.

One fine day I told my brains to go take a walk and come back later. Then I proceeded to try out filling out paid surveys on the Internet to see what that was about. Of course, I gave my email, telephone, etc., to a whole lot of places.

After only one day of this, I got spammed to Kingdom Come and my telephone rang off the hook for several days.

I still get a call once in a while. Fortunately I used a Gmail account and not my regular email, so at least Google's excellent spam feature was able to weed out most of the garbage after a while. I still get about 300 spam mails a day in that account's spam folder, though.

One of the things I did that day was submit my poem to what appeared to be a poetry contest. The promotion text was a bit different than the hard sell, so that called my attention to it. (But I still had not asked my brains to come back from the walk, so I plowed on ahead.) After I submitted the poem and getting a ton of offers, I got a message back saying that they needed to take a couple of weeks to examine the poem.

After the spam deluge, I forgot about this. Then I started getting emails from the company offering me to publish this poem in a dandy-fine anthology that, of course, I would have to buy. And more offers followed. Commemorative plaque. Recording by an artist. And so on. All designed to get their mitts into my pocket and all telling me what a genius I was.

However, part of the hustle seems to be some kind of contest for real and some kind of prequalification. I received a booby prize!!!

These dudes are really slick, too. They sent me what amounts to a release for publication that I have to sign to be included in the anthology, but couched it among a pile of offers. The super-clever part was including the poem on the front of the envelope in a bleed through screen like the address was.

Despite the hype, the poem seems to be moving up in the contest all by itself. I certainly have not been responding to anything. I went ahead and signed the release to see where this goes. At least my brains have come back from the stroll (I hope).

I have to admit, vanity-wise, these people hit home with that envelope. And my brain-child is going to be enshrined in Immortal Verses of The International Library of Poetry. My dear Kitten will be enshrined among the immortals, too.

Yay!!!

This is vanity-press crap, but I swear I might end up buying the damn thing.

Michael