why it's OK to apologize

A friend is always telling me "never apologize." I tend to speak two or three apologetic sentences before I read a poem. Anyway people seem to think the sentences are apologetic. It's not just one friend who tells me to SHUT UP AND READ, it's a whole throng of people, dating back as long as I remember. I haven't just apologized for poems, I've apologized for
2000 types of offenses, and now you're wondering why I'm so sure of the number, I'm borrowing it from the Lever soap commercial.

I actually think we should all apologize for existing. I'm especially apologetic tonight because my existence seems to require way too much explanation. Explanation is something poets sometimes do prior to reading which is mistaken, sometimes, for apologizing. "But if you don't know I grew up on a houseboat, you won't understand why in the poem
I talk about leaning out the kitchen window and grabbing a fat fish."
That's an apologetic explanation for an explanation. If Bob the poet at the reading you went to tonight had delivered words along these lines between poems, would it have ruined the evening for you???

I feel like apologizing because of what I've been publishing on my blog, but that's nothing new. I feel like explaining: Rae was holding a gun to my right temple, I said NO I can't publish your poem on my blog, I'll DIE before you do, but she clicked the orange button with her left foot. I didn't know she had done this until later, and by then it was too late, everyone who wasn't going to read the blog hadn't read it.

What makes me such an effusive blogger??? I've always got to write a new blog entry to apologize for the one that came before. The most awkward ones seem to be as awkward in reality as I think they are after clicking
the orange button --- OOOPS --- of course I know I can always delete.
I'm going to delete Rae's poem but not until I print out a copy.

Have I quoted this Elton John song before?

I'm sorry I took your time
I am the poem that doesn't rhyme.

---Harriet