Anita-Corbo

I took screenshots of 9 poems I wrote from 2009 through 2016 that were published on a website & in poetry books. A few have personal photos in the background & a few have royalty-free clip-art. The frustration was running high on my end due to finding out that my account was hacked into. My profile picture was removed, then another profile picture was added that wasn't mine, then that one was removed, then they added photos to my poems that were not of my choosing & then changed my password so I couldn't log in to fix it. So I abandoned the account many years ago. That is one of the reasons I honestly can’t stand social media. Trolls & hackers & stalking…

These poems I look back on & realize that they sound rather corny & my thinking at the time was just to express my pain & sadness through a creative outlet in a fun way. They were never meant on my part to make money from because when I submitted my poems to be published I had to sign a waiver saying that I wasn't subject to royalties made from the sale of the books. Which was OK by me.

My thinking was they could be turned into songs. So I naively submitted some of them & then signed a contract with a music record company who composed the actual music & linked it with my lyrics. This turned out to be futile. After many promises & letters telling me that my songs were going to be circulated & I would be receiving royalties from my work, nothing ever came of it.

There was actually a time where I was sitting in my car & was listening to the radio & could have sworn that some lyrics I submitted were being played on the radio. From a super famous country music star!!! They were not the literal lyrics I wrote but were so damn close that I was blown away by the eerie similarity. Did they just use me & steal my words thinking that some unknown nobody of a person in the world would never know while a 20-year established veteran in the business is making millions off my work? The sad part is this country star might never have known that the lyrics he sang were written by someone else & he may have also naively just believed whatever the lyricist put in front of him.

So I did some research & found that this goes on alot with the music business.

I called the producer & told him what I thought was happening. He vehemently denied anything was happening & hung up on me very quickly. The interesting part of this was I never told him what country music star or the name of the song was that I felt had upset me. But I looked up this star’s name & his playlist online & wouldn't you know, the song that was pirated from me was coincidentally taken down? I literally could NOT find it playing anywhere. And I never heard it on the radio again.

So if I never told this person the name of the song or the name of the person singing the song, how come he knew which song to remove from the playlist???

Hmmm???

Then I thought since I used to play piano as a child, I could start playing again & actually compose my own songs. But that was just another fleeting thought. Trust issues with the industry on my end were still there, so I lost hope.

So today I woke up & told myself that I would find a way to regain access to the silly poetry I published many years ago. I don't write poems anymore. It was never a passion of mine. It was just another creative way to deal with the circumstances that life had dealt me.

A big shout out to Poetry Nation for letting me publish my poetry on their website & for Eber & Wein publishing my poetry in their books they worked so hard on all these years. That’s a helluva lot of paperwork to go through & submitting my poems was a delightful pleasure for me way back when! Thank you for all the editing, all the reading, all the proofreading & meeting deadlines. Without you, I would not be a published writer. (Just to be clear, you are not the music company who hijacked my words).

THANK YOU!!! ❤😁❤

Anyways, I'm not publishing these screenshots for people to fawn over. I’m doing it just to set the record straight on my end & to give myself some sort of validation that free speech still exists in this country. As a note, I did not display the song that was in question. I hope you can get a glimpse of the vulnerability I’m willing to show about coping in life. Those times are gone, though, & I’ve moved on.

Sometimes just writing down some of our struggles & purging them is good enough to help you move past them. I have no ill will towards anyone about my past. I believe you hold your head up & just try to move on. Forgiving is difficult, though. I need to work on that more. It’s always been a challenge for me.

We all struggle in some way. I didn’t know any better, that’s all. I was trusting, I was gullible, I believed the best in people.

Sometimes I still do. Maybe not as much as I used to, but I still do.

I’m not sure that’s a great quality to have coupled with my cynicism & sarcasm at times, but I'm still a work in progress.

We all are…

BTW, this is a true story. (As always)…

🎹🎵❤🎵🎹