Back in April, when I started posting longhand haiku and poetry here, I decided to host the images on Flickr. It was done to spare my web server in the unlikely (yet entirely welcome) event of a gargantuan traffic spike.

Such a spike has yet to occur, but the decision seems to have had another benefit. It’s helped make the material accessible to folks not prone to visiting indie sites like this one. Thanks to the ease of modern photo sharing on Flickr, a dozen or so of my longhand images are floating around on literally hundreds of Tumblr, Livejournal and Blogger sites. While only a tiny fraction of people who view my Flickr-based images ever come to this actual site, it’s pretty gratifying to know people are seeing and enjoying my output — it’s only a little bittersweet that most of them seem to be teenage girls.

My inner capitalist would love to convert the increased exposure into cold, hard cash (or at least a few more book sales?). Unfortunately, I have no inner marketing genius to figure out how.

Meanwhile, my inner teenager wants to know why I didn’t write more poetry for girls to see when I was actually a teenager. If only I’d had the internets and social networking back then…

we pass in the night,
adrift like human vessels
craving connection