Don't Smoke Weed
It is 3.00 a.m. late September 2017 and Kevin's "almost girlfriend" of 20 years plus is rolling a scaled down version of a Camberwell Carrot. All the wine has been consumed and for a reason I cannot recall, the unwelcome plant may have had something to do with it, I show her some of the poetry I had written as a teenager. The title of this collection instantly burned into my head and I made the reckless decision to do the literary equivalent of publishing my own baby photos.Sophisticated is not an adjective that springs to mind to describe these poems, they are in places uncomfortably cliched. They are the simple poems of a teenage boy but they do have the essence of something. I can see how they developed over the decades into the intentionally stark, cynically blunt and sometimes deliberately controversial.
You might be forgiven, though I won't forgive you, after reading this that I have a history of mental illness. This is not true and at least in part because much of what is described by some as mental illness I call personality.
You might also conclude that I spent my formative years being repeatedly dumped. This isn't true either. It's just that the urge to write a poem about a breakup I had initiated didn't strike me until over 25 years later. I must confess to a morsel of editing. Some of the lines had far too much Edam so I had to add pickle to sharpen them. Indeed there were whole poems I love but have omitted out of embarrassment. Imagine what a poem entitled "Letter To The Man Whose Fault It Was" might contain. I'll give you a brief glimpse into the mind of a 17 year old, angry to discover that life is far more complex than a Rubik's cube.
"I am the darkness, I will uncurl, unfurl, unleash, unwrap - I am the demon of despair, the dancer of delusion, the nocturnal nemesis, I am the darkness"
Good job the overzealous "Prevent" didn't exist in those days.