Backstory

80s

Furious. He scrawled lines like graffiti
on walls of places he’d never been.

Fighting wars with pencils while
others stood face to face with men beating their shields
with truncheons.

90s:

Experimented with having a corporate job.

Made one discovery.

Bankers don’t write poems until they get fired.

2000s

The therapy years. The tears.

embracing his anima, and his inner child
he wrote of trees, lost love, death, the wild.

And everything moved in rhyming couplets
Except all the bits that didn’t.

2010

Too angry to write
he took a silent season
walking to the light

That was twenty-sixteen really. But twenty-ten rhymes with Zen.
(His haiku got no better)

2020

Encountered free verse, prose poetry. Read Zong. The Overstory. Shuddered to realise a howling ignorance. About justice, the point, the very act of writing. Questioning his right to write. Started to un
                                                r
a                                                                      v                                  e                          l
and kept on writing.