Temporary Poems (1995-2008)

For a period of maybe three and a half years, when I was at university and deep in my Bukowski phase, I wrote perhaps three or four poems every night on a student's A4 notepad, propped up in bed.

Most of these were just noise, workouts, a means to cut through the chatter and approach the clang of something sure and lasting: the few. I kept those ones; the others got binned every time I moved house, and some even earlier.

Each flitting presents a chance for reappraisal, and some poems that had made it through the previous filter inevitably got caught up in the next. Which now makes me wonder whether I threw out any good ones, impatiently packing my stuff through a hangover cloud, but you can't dwell on things like that.

Reading the handwritten sheets is weird: the survivors. My handwriting has changed, and the paper itself has yellowed - some of it at least - despite being kept out of the light. I guess it's a chemical thing.

So out of the thousands of A4 pages, these are the ones that lasted. They've been joined by more recent lines, lines that wouldn't fit into songs, or wouldn't fit my voice. Lines with long Scottish vowels that jar when sung. Would and could.

On reflection, I should really have preceded the poems with a quote from Gwendolyn Brooks: "Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there." I love those words, but maybe they'll work for something else in time.

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