Me...I am over the moon again!!!! 
Love
ty all so much.
They announced the visual art categories first and my daughters and I waited quite impatiently for the literary ones. When they got to the Free Verse category (my entry was "A Gift for You", the piece so many of you have helped me vote for this week!)
) . When I turned to look at the crowd, my wife was there in the front. She was supposed to be working until 8 but got off work and showed up for the award. It was a great day today. 
A friend who has supported me more than I deserve, she has featured me and the cost of that feature was the proliferation of said Feature Feature. So I have featured many of the wonderful people who have changed my life, without tying them to features of their own. To all of you who are featured, please feel free to do some features of your own, and spread the love.
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Her granular and raw captures of live music attracted me to her initially, but her growing efforts and changes kept me coming back for more.
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I do not have a tattoo yet and I may never have one, but were I to get one, THIS guy would be the artist whose work i would have inked on me.
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I have always enjoyed the detailed macro-ish(technically I think they are not macro photography, but damn it is what macro photos want to be) quality of her work with flowers and plants.
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She is lovely and this is some old school bits of her delicious and ever growing gallery.
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You like Dragons!?! Then Get some of this artist!
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She is irreverent and beautiful, and she makes me think with her stark strong views.
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So this guy is quirky and insightful and his poetry can turn to love but most generally branches out to the fringes where creativity grows.
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Alec has a depth and breadth to his work that is exceptional. He speaks to events of the heart and of history. You will learn about our world and the great characters that make up our past as well.
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She is a dark angel and yet there is still hope in her grim looks of her work.
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She displays an intimacy that makes me feel like a voyeur into her life.
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These are two facets of a gem named Kelsey. She has always been one of my favorites and each time she posts something it is a delight. You will be a better person for reading her work.
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Please read the poem above before preceding any further. I have included a reply piece to the lovely piece above. It is not a poem that deserves any credit, but the emotional response I had to the original work. I wanted to know his side of the story---so I made it up.
To Kelsey:
I loved that one so much I blatantly plagiarized it to make a companion piece. I hope you enjoy it. Truly inspired by yours(half of it still is yours!)
"2669-B Part II"
In the early hours, when he wakes up, she is already awake. After he kisses the sweet spot of her neck, that skin that feels so soft that it must be thin, he lights the first Marlboro Red and takes the first drag. After getting dressed and firing up the coffee pot, he watches here as she stares at the ceiling. He grabs a cup and leaves the rest, hoping it will inspire her to life before noon. By 6 drags into the second smoke, he knows she won’t be getting up to see him out and quietly slips out the door. He will be home to see her in 12 hours and 22 minutes.
God, those minutes go slowly.
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As he puts the cases on the line he thinks about how he met her. By 70 he is to how she rejected his offer of a drink as she doodled in her notebook on his friend’s couch, by 515 he is to how she said she didn’t “want to dance with anyone tonight”, and by 847 he is to the part when he was about to leave and she took his hand-853-led him to the porch-865- and ferociously kissed him-892-and walked herself home. She was always referencing that notebook like it held the next line of dialogue in their passion play. 1567-she moved in. 1657-I hope she doesn’t notice the 19 6-legged occupants that like to tango across the bedroom ceiling every night. 2179-and the last case has cleared the line.
Most nights that he drives home from the warehouse, he watches the odometer on his 1974 Dodge Dart as it clicks forward, 78997.4(it’s rolled over twice already). 78999 where did her game plan notebook go-79000- don’t forget to ask about that tonight. 79002.3- he grind the cigarette butt on the driveway and wonders what he will find inside.
She is sleeping on the carpet with John Daniels in her hand (he lets you call him John when you know ‘em well enough). He caps the John-7 twists-and he carries her softly to the mattress-19 steps-and tucks her in. After the last smoke, he lays beside her counting the tiles.
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" Every white tile is a reason she will leave me; every black tile is a chance she will overlook all of my faults and stay. "
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"When are you going to take up writing again?" he asked wondering where she kept that old roadmap.
"When are you going to stop being such an ass?" she muttered, he was sure she’d gone off script.
He is 22 years old.
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She ignored John tonight and saved herself for him. He presses her up against the clean white walls and kisses her like he never plans on stopping; he thinks Life might be ok.
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It is at night when he is running his thumbs over that secret dip in her clavicle that he is most contemplative.
"Do you love me?" he asks, his mouth muffled against the skin of her shoulder
She runs her knuckles against his forearm and wonders about the galaxy that may or may not exist between them.
"There are 5,337 tiles," she finally answers, “and 2,669 of them are black.”
"I know." He rolls them both over so that he is beneath her and she cannot see the tiled ceiling or the stars before pulling her down to whisper in her ear.
"Sometimes I count them."
