excellent Dave.

You make me smile - laugh - go to mypodcast.com and sign up for free there and record your work - that would be awesome - as they say here - where ever this is

This speaks all too loudly to me right now. It seem the loudest voice one ever hears is the one that never speaks at all. I won't listen to it, but it's good to know someone else hears it too. Thank you, Dave--again.

Ah Dave, I talk to myself all the time and answer too. And I've been in some of those English pubs long enough to have to pee against the wall. Great places to meet people. I loved the time I spent there.

Dave, hear me out. please. but I think that we are all criminal in this respect, in the sense that the history of what has been written before and so brilliantly is a tough act to follow. that sometimes for this well recorded and brilliant history, we are all apt to melt at its brilliance and toss what we have deem a pittance into the bin out of haste and frustration or embarrassment that we've seen all of it written somewhere before and probably better. but if we permit the notion of their having said it better than we ever could, then we would make that frustration an unscalable barrier, at the foot of which would be a perfect place to wilt all ambition to write, and yet something in us prevails and we continue saying it in the way we know how. and to me, this poem is saying it like Dave, not to be mistaken for any other Dave, but dee Dave Fitzgerald.

Well, this poem, its first line and all, is so really BAD (you know that alternative meaning of bad) that it goes in my favorites list. The best sentence to capture part of what I think you are getting at is what a wise man once told me: "Comparisons are odious." Unfortunately that great truth and my belief in it has not ceased my regular habit of violating it. It frequently happens when I read an astonishingly good piece of prose or poetry (like yours) and talk myself into all those $#%@ty self-shaming condemnations of my own work. One last thing. I am listening to a series of CDs - lectures about the American writer, Mark Twain, in which the lecturer spoke of how much Twain depended on and thought of the writings of others. I suppose that all great writers do something quite similar. Soooo... I am trying to give myself permission to join their company. Wonderful poem, Dave. You are a brilliant writer.