Hardy Parkerson• Show poetry

I try to write in the style of Edgar Lee Masters and Langston Hughes. I try to make my poems rhyme, but I do not get too concerned with meter and all that stuff. I don't really understand what's iambic and trochaic and all that stuff. To me all that takes the fun out of poetry. However, I have read enough good poetry that I can pick up some of that without knowing really what it is called, whether it is iambic, trochaic, anapestic and such. I'm not adverse to learning that, but it just takes so much time to master all of that. About me? Well, I'm as nice a guy as one could ever be;/But everyone hates a nice guy,/For a nice guy never wins;/So I'll make a million dollars/And then they'll be my friends./For everyone loves a rich guy,/But when you're down and broke,/No one wants to be your friend/And that, my friend,'s no joke./Friends you haven't any/When you haven't got a penny. As I get older, sometimes I feel that people are interested in you only so long as they can use you to accomplish their goals, that everybody is just interested in his or her own agenda, and that if they can't use you to further their agenda, they don't want anything to do with you. Am I right? In America, if you don't have money, you are zero, nothing. If you've got money, people love you, even if you don't do anything for them. I call the U.S. the United States of Money and Materialism. I visit prisons all the time./They're filled with men/Whose greatest crime/Is that they haven't got a dime. There is more to it than this, but this is something to think about. I suppose I have given upwards of a quarter million to my church over the years, and one day my preacher asked my brother-in-law, "What's wrong with old Hardy?" My brother in law asked him what he meant. The preacher said, "Well, he's a lawyer and and he drives an old car." Now if I had written a check for $25,000 and had my picture taken and put in the newspaper showing me handing him the check, they would all have loved me. But putting it in the offering plate regularly over a long period of time, doesn't count with them. Yes, I've got an attitude, but I got it honestly. (If you wanta make friends and keep them, never discuss religion and politics with people who are not of your own religious and/or political persuasion.)

Hardy