ocvictor has a regular column at Gotpoetry.com that keeps me thinking every time I read and re-read the work.
This caught me today:
… It didn’t much matter to me what happened to my poems. Light them on fire, for all I cared. Sell a few chapbooks to make some spending cash and supplement the retail book-sales job, get the ego boost from the crowd, flirt with girls and take a perverse sort of satisfaction from being outside the poetry establishment. Who cared if I wasn’t getting published in any of the big journals or didn’t have an MFA? I was rock ‘n’ roll, man. I was the fringe of the fringe. It was fun for a while.
I was also lying to myself. Little bit, anyway. Because underneath the bravado, I find I cared very dearly that someone was listening, that someone was reading. Underneath it all, I had some dim, subconscious impulse telling me that the only way these poems mattered is if they reach someone else’s ear.
Good reading. Good point. Crisis inducing for me, as always…
When I was young, I figured I was, if not immortal, then at least consequential; that I would be missed if I was gone. As I’ve aged, I’ve come to believe that isn’t true. I’ll be personally missed for a while, and then I’ll fade as the lives I’ve touched move on and find new things and people to move them.
But a poem may last. I keep hoping for something, anything I’ve written to be among the poems that last. I’m less sure than ever, but I can’t help but try for that.
I want to be remembered, if not known now; I’ve almost given up on that. But if I am remembered, let what lasts be something that transcends me and my name and my miserable life. I’ve stopped caring about Tony Brown; all that seems worth saving from this life is the work Tony Brown did. Even if I end up as “Anonymous” somewhere, in some table of poems, that will be enough.
Read more of Victor’s work here:
How to Succeed as a Failing Writer!
It’s better than success!
Dark Matter 
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