Forging friendships across the world

One of the things that I like about the Internet is that it allows you the advantage of meeting folk that you might never have the chance to do otherwise, albeit that you meet them in a 'virtual world'. Recently, whilst looking for any information on the poet Richard Ball on the Internet, I stumbled across a Blog which is the home site of a poet named Billy Jones, aka 'Recycle Billy', and decided to follow through his site a little. It turned out that Richard Ball was one of the poets who had influenced Billy, and he has a great respect for Richard's writing, as I have myself. This gave us some good common ground, and so I decided to drop him a line, and then thought that it would be good if it was a line in verse. Hence I sent him the following:

I stumbled across your blog today,
and that's not all ---
for when I arrived at the starting point
you mentioned Richard Ball.
You say he was an influence
on the way you craft your words,
well, I was the first to publish him,
I wondered if you'd heard.
I had the mighty privilege
of counting him a friend,
and watching him with pen in hand,
as words would twist and bend
until he wrenched a poem
from the bowels of the page;
yes, Richard surely qualifies
as a 'Great Man' of this Age.

Billy says on his Blog, BloggingPoet.com, that it used to be (I quote), 'one of the most, if not the most, popular poetry blogs in the world with as many as 80,000 plus readers a month until keeping up my popularity wore me down.' Why not take a look at his site and see for yourself.

One of the things that I likes about his work that I read on the blog was the fact that, in much the same manner as myself, he writes for the 'ordinary man' with no pretence about being a great academic. He writes the things that he wants to say, communicating them in an easily read and absorbed format. In my experience this is what matters. What's the point in being so clever with what you write that hardly anyone wants to read it because they can't understand what you are getting at? Below I'm posting one of the verses that I particularly liked, and which spoke the words that illustrate and educate at one and the same time.

A Poet Dreams

His dreams were things he'd never seen,
things he'd never known.
Words repressed into regrets--
no voices on the phone.
And while he waits, he hesitates
to breach the great unknown,
step out into a world anew...
He hides there all alone.

Copyright 2009, Billy Jones

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