A Robot Poem

A couple years ago:

     I wrote a robot poem.

     I don't usually write robot poems. I mean, yes, there's nothing wrong with robot poems, but I tend to stick pretty close to my genre: talking animals stories. And robots don't really qualify under that account.

     Still, for whatever reason—I've pretty much stopped looking for reasons when it comes to the things I do; I assume they're there, sure, but I don't go looking for them—I wrote a robot poem. As befit the whole concept, I wrote it in "free verse" with no rhyme scheme, no meter, none of my usual sort of poetic stuff. It was a robot poem, after all. Modern! Clanking! Peculiar! Et Cetera!

     I sent the poem out to the usual poem-publishing places, but none of them were interested. That happens with alarming regularity when it comes to the stuff I write. But that doesn't stop me from sending it out over and over and over again. And sometimes, as I chronicled earlier this year, stories that I wrote decades ago end up selling to markets that didn't exist way back when.

     So I had this robot poem. And then, along came this call for robot poems from an anthology that was scheduled to be called Giant Robot Poems.

     I had to think twice because, well, the robot in my poem isn't really giant. But I sent it in, they decided to use it, and now the anthology's been released. So happy endings all around!

                                                                                     Mike