Finally Found My Balls!

Finally found my balls, my poetic balls that is. No, that's not entirely true - finally found my balls to publish my poetry, even if it's just the internet. There's a website called poetry.com, a contest really, which posts poetry. My poetry is copyrighted and posted under my own name or whatever pen name I choose. This could be the start of something big for me.
There are rules, poetry limited to 20 lines and each line to 60 characters, but I'm sure all editors have requirements. It forces me to fine tune my poems. At first I felt the editors were butchering my poetry and raking me across the "creativity coals", but as I looked into it more, all editors have requirements for works submitted.
Writing for publication is something I've always wanted to do, since I was a teenager. In fact, my first choice, my first real choice of a profession, was authorship. Always wanted to be writer. I don't recall when or where the bug first bit me - maybe it was when I was shyly hiding away in the high school library before class and during lunch, it had to have been about that time. I didn't really give much other effort or energy to any other thing to spend my life's work. Even with afterschool jobs of cleaning floors in a burger joint, or my first job of kennel boy at Austin and Associates Veterinary clinic, deep down inside what I really wanted to do was to write, get published, get rich, and spend the rest of my life as a writer no matter what else may come.
When I graduated high school, started classes at the local community college I put down english major thinking that would be the ticket. Little did I know how much real work was involved. I was just an idealistic child with no true idea of what it was to be writer, editing, revising, publishing, rejection, submitting work to editors, competition amongst writers, making deadlines, getting educated, getting started, paying bills, making a living in the mean time until the" big one" was published and just life in general. I had no idea, still don't.
I just knew and felt deep down inside of the deepest recesses of my mind, body and soul that I wanted to be was a writer. Meanwhile - reality bites, it bites hard, holds on tight, doesn't let go, and life goes on. I was only 19, where was the" big one"? I had a notebook full of poems which just sat there and yellowed and collected dust. I didn't do a thing with it.
The early 20's is still a tender age for some people, it was for me. Life went on. I grew bored with college, enlisted in the Navy thinking in the back of my head I'd have some adventures which I'd write about but the reality was I didn't have much discipline for much else so I put ideas of being a writer aside and life went on. Fact is I learned a trade, I was a hospital corpsman and that has been the professional foundation of my life thus far. Of couse there was some adventure, but more importantly I learned and still have a foundation; professionally, personally, and in so many other ways that the military finds to affect one for the rest of ones life. More about that later.
Funny how life goes on. I didn't do much more about a career as a writer except to read about it and read what other people were writing. If anything I was, still do, contribute to their "big ones". I read and read, anything that caught my fancy or held my interests. I collected books, still collect books, on of my very few vices. Instead of becoming a writer, I've become a reader, a voracious one. I'm the type of reader likened to a shark.
Readers like myself start a book, no two or three books, and devote so much time to reading that we do little else. We put down reading as a favorite activity, hit the bookstores on a regular basis, spend money we don't have on books, join two or three book clubs, and neglect a lot of the rest of our lives because we're always reading or spending time in libraries. It's almost an addiction and it pours over into every aspect of our lives.
We marry like-readers, live our lives around our personal libraries, decorate our homes with books, and are rarely found without a book or two within arms reach. Take a look at my living room, three big bookcases lining the walls and each space of shelf filled. At least it's not drugs or alcohol or gambling or anything like that. Meanwhile my writing career still sits on the shelf in a blue binder stuffed with yellowed notebook pages, scraps of paper and some typewritten sheets.
At least that's where it was until a friend of mine told me about poetry.com. So I dusted it off rewrote some stuff and put it on. It was a big step, the first step. The first baby step was a poem I had published in my high school newspaper. Just one little poem in the back pages, that was the only piece of anything I had ever written and had published in any form. But this was for real, copyright and all. Now I'm a writer.
Life happens and somewhere in life one finds what they want, rare, but it happens.
It might me some tiny little thing like a poem published on the internet, but it happens. Not always the way we might want, but life happens. So that's my adventure, my adventures as a writer and I'm sure more to follow on that later. Meanwhile I'm enjoying it, I'm enjoying life and I can't wait for tommorrow.