May My Writing Addiction Be Called a Vocation?

I want to ask whether poetry has been a vocation for me, as I do believe that I was called to write.

At the age of fourteen, after receiving the Signet Keats for Christmas, I consciously and deliberately dedicated my life to poetry.

I figured that, if I died at twenty-six as Keats did, I would have had enough time to write what I had to write.

I'm now seventy-three, and I've written a lot, but maybe not as much as Keats.

I have written many hundreds of poems and assembled most of those I haven't discarded or lost into about twenty printed collections. 

Because I've written a lot and I like what I've written, I can say that poetry has been a successful calling for me. 

However, if vocation implies the professional cred due to a poetry teacher or a published author, my devotion to poetry can only be called amateur.

I've written because I love writing, not because it gains me money or tenure or any other kind of status.

I have never wanted to submit for publication, and I have become less and less comfortable performing my work.

That may change, I won't say it won't. 

When I was a teenager I burned everything I wrote in the backyard incinerator. 

I recently tried to rewrite the only poem that I regretted burning--a poem about an uncanny childhood experience--as a Yokel Song:

                                                                      Monday, September 2, 2019

Lost Poem About a Mouse

I wrote a poem about a mouse
and burned it.
Out in the snow,

far from any house, mouse-
tracks ran lickety-split
around some cactus

and a cholla bush,
stopping at
a tiny mouse-y

mound. Filmy snow
covered it,
but it glowed out gray

and was as dead as any mouse
could be, sunlight
dwelling softly on its tiny house

of snow—dear little mouse,
broad sky
a pillow for your rest.
Lost poem about a mouse.