at 13 i fell in love with a 15 year old girl, who sooned turned 16, & able to drive. i wrote long-hand love poems to her in notebooks, the most forceful act i cld do when not talking to her on the phone for many solid hours. i don't remeber how we ended, but at my first year of college in 1972 she was in an accident, her vett slipped under the back of a semi truck, decapitating her. poetry became energy. my highschool sweetheart kathy must have had hundreds of sappy loves poems written for her, & ultimately there's tragedy there too. i felt my being bend to forms of poetry, felt most comfortable with the likes of ez pound & charles olson & robert creeley & william carlos williams, but read various outshoots from w.s. merwin to ms. plath, to the beats, kerouac, to henry miller, buwoski, intrigued by language poets i.e., larry eigner, & the PROCESS, which i knew in my early 20's wld be a life-long process. a poet must live by his wit's, i remember creeley explaining in an interview, & my wits had me working in various factories for 35 years. still, thru all the decades, i wrote. i cldn't NOT write. it was NECESSARY. i had no control. wild years of drunken readings. & most of the details i cannot recall. these days, married to ann, who is also a writer, who fell in love with in the mountains of new hampshire 25 years from suddenly hearing her voice in my soon-be-lost house thru a long marriage into divorce & the rage of that, hell, but ann, my love, soul-mate moved up against lake erie & we married & aging without mercy, thanks the stars for the strike at the last factory, i'm out of that, into something different: weighed against 350 degree presses & fiberglass dust, all metals yell, & i sit in a partial cubicle now, headset on, keyboard under my finger & the computer screen. it isn't a job without stress, & it doesn't pay factory wages, & the hours change weekly; whatever, at age 54 i'm a poet. i've worked relentlessly. i never want to stop.