I am not a poet.

I am mildly dyslexic. This made spelling kind of a challenge. In school, K-12, when the English teachers, while tying to teach creative writing, would subtract 1 point for each spelling error. I could fail any writing assignment in a single paragraph. So, while they were trying to teach us to express ourselves, they were really training me to use the simplest words possible. It is extremely hard to express oneself with words a dyslexic can spell with any certainty.

One teacher tried to fix the problem by saying she would only take a maximum of ten points off for spelling. An A was 95 to 100. A B was 85-95. With a guaranteed -10 to my grade, I had a 5-point leeway to get a B, and that required a level of perfection beyond my ability, but I could get a C by doing the minimum.

My eighth-grade teacher tried valiantly to get me to express myself in writing, but the pattern was set. I had learned not to write.

The Army’s method of helping me overcome stage fright was make me an instructor. I had to express ideas with words of more than one or two syllables—but that’s not writing, that’s teaching.

When I became an engineer, it became necessary to communicate ideas in writing—but that’s not writing, that’s engineering.

I’ve always been a creative person, with a love of how words work and how to express ideas in images, visual and audible—but that’s not writing, that’s art.

As I lived, I gained experiences that were fun to share and when the people with whom I wanted to share were not available I would write the experiences down—but that’s not writing, that’s story telling.

Then, in my early 60’s, I earned my Master’s in Education, not for any other reason than to fill in the blanks not covered in years of experience. The problem of being self-taught is one only learns the things related to what one is doing at the time. One of the courses was about using poetry to teach other subjects. We did not worry about deep inner meaning or social significance, we just attempted to express ideas that cannot always be expressed in direct words. Poetry, like art, communicates indirectly by touching shared experiences.

So, I am not a poet. I am merely a person who occasionally attempts to paint with words.