How do you write a poem ? I've been doing it for about 20 years now, and all I can say about it is – I haven't got a fucking clue. There's a conscious process of inspiration, of thinking about how some other writer you enjoyed would have expressed something, and an unconscious process of just expressing yourself and they are in constant conflict and out of that contradiction comes poetry.
I have no idea why there are times I can write 5 good poems in an hour, and times I can't write a line of poetry in six months.
But my latest six months appear to be ending… I had a depressing few weeks, you know they kind, when you're nostalgic and romanticise the past even as you know you're doing it and remind yourself of what was wrong with those same pictures – and then you just feel sadder because your memories are as sad as the world now ? And all you can do is cling to the few people who make you happy, because you know the world probably never will.
Then I had a hectic weekend, an insane one, going from one emotional extreme to another – with a shitload of rock and roll thrown in.
How do you write poetry ? Fuck me if I know… but I can tell you how I wrote this one. I took all those crazy emotions of this weekend – and quite a few of you reading will recognize yourselves as having produced one of these intense moments… and you try to find out what the emotion behind it was, and find words to make others feel the same feeling -and then you tell them what you are doing to them so they feel it even more (you hope)… and you build it all around a line that started as a horrible joke you then declared "I have to use in a poem one day" to the general horror of your current audience.
And you call the whole thing by a neologistic title that nobody will be entirely sure they figured out.
And so I give you: Secretionitive
Then finally, to put an unpopped cherry on the old cake, you write a blogpost (which you haven't done in too long) about writing a poem (which you haven't done in even longer) and you try to make sense of your mind until everybody thinks you're being really insightful… or something.