The Jungles Of The Skull

The first thing you do in a poem is to forget making sense. Life doesn’t make sense, why should a poem? The second thing to do in a poem is to forget you’re writing a poem. You’re not writing a poem. The poem is writing you. The third thing to do in a poem is to go swimming. Go swimming in language. Pick a language, any language, dive in and swim. If you feel wet and immediate you’re in a poem. If you feel tentative and impatient you’re in a doctor’s exam room waiting for a physical. And if you feel wobbly and unimportant you’re either on a bus or sitting on a barstool. In either case, if you’re patient, impatiently patient, patiently impatient, slimy and turbulent, nimble and insecure, dazzled and intertwined, eventually a poem will come into your head and sit down and wait for you to write it: feed it words, bring it into existence. Your job is done. You can take another swig of whiskey in good conscience and set sail another day for the shores of the iconoclastic, the jungles of the skull.