Welcome to my adventures and experiments in creativity. Where writing is like running: sometimes I know where I'm going, and sometimes I see where the mood takes me.


Thursday 3 March 2011

Poetry Corner

First, an assumption: that stringing two sentences out over several lines can be classed as ‘writing’.

So – in ‘writing’ the previous post, and particularly in adopting a ‘non-prose’ structure for it (I think I can get away with that description), I was reminded of both how brilliant writing poetry can be, and how fundamentally annoying it is all at the same time.

It also reminded me of the best – and only – poem I have ever written, if you don’t count all those English lessons at school where we were forced into putting dull subjects into verse, counting syllables and remembering things like ‘iambic pentameter’. The work is nearly six years old, but has lost none of its resonance despite the cold, dark, frightening times we live in now.

Picture the scene – at the pub one evening, a number of us are given straws with our drinks. Our friend Becky decides she is not content with a single straw, and so takes another and tries to drink through both. The evening was a riot, clearly, and this poem celebrates that.

The more literary among you may notice that the two verses have identical syllables in each line, though I’m not sure a proper poet would draw attention to something like that.


STRAWS
(A piss-take)

Oh Becky,
take these humble
straws

and make them
into one big
one.

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