As publisher, and until recently Editor-in-Chief, I am, or was, the only person who could write anything I wanted on my column and no one could tell it wasn’t fit to print. This is a lot of fun sometimes, and scary at others.

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Now, don’t get me wrong, I have not, to my memory, ever told a page editor they could not put in whatever the heck they wanted, but we have an understanding they will “swim in their lane.” Vera selects, comments on, and publishes formal, Kevin, the same with haiku and very short poetry, and so on with each editor. But I am allowed to wander all over the map.

As this is a literary publication (in my mind I always first type on paper, and then replace it with publication - I am a “paper and ink” man at heart), I feel I have a certain responsibility to comment on something of a literary bent, but a quick review of my first 19 columns shows I strayed from anything remotely literary in most of them.

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This month, I am staying literary in the sense that I am telling a couple of stories, but my message is hardly literary, except in the sense that dreams are literary.

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What I would like to know, from you the reader: do you like what I am doing here?

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Do you wish I would use it more as a conventional platform to look at issues strictly within the poetry and literary worlds of today?

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By the way, if you have something to say, in the form of your own essay or any comment longer than a couple of paragraphs, I am open to having a guest post on the from the mind of. As we have Better than Fiction, most non-fiction should probably go there, but if it fits, and you would like to be the guest columnist for a month, let me know.

1515 Bream Dreams 

Between the ages of eight and 28, a few times a year, in some family setting, we had a big fish fry. Occasionally I had crappy, never bass, rarely catfish. Sometimes other people in the family would catch bass and they would fry them. I didn’t need bass, only bream and crappy.

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Another thing, about a decade ago, after the 2004-2005 storms hit South Florida, there was a building at 1515 Flagler Drive. The 1515 building it was so badly damaged that it had to be imploded. It was 20 something stories. I got my then two-year-old set on my shoulders, my then 20-year-old took his phone or camera or something and videoed the collapse as we stood a couple blocks away watching it happen.

When I was younger I had a little fantasy when I was older (like the age I am now) I would be rich. Then I would have a country house, not a big house, more of a cottage, with a nice big porch that overlooked a small pond. I would have a johnboat and I would go out every day and poke around and catch a few bream, have a fish fry, maybe not every day, once or twice per week. Maybe not every week, but if I was rich enough, this would be my winter or summer home where I would take off work for a few weeks or a few months out of the year and in my well-stocked little pond I would catch what we would call a mess of bream, slightly more fish than a medium size group of people can eat in one sitting.