Every Poem I've Ever Written

Have you ever been afraid that someone will find your diary and read it? That the unabashed revelation contained therein will be so embarrassing that you immediately curl up and die on the spot?

Me too. Which is why I'm revealing the existence of this blog. It is a preemptive strike, a revelation that will hopefully keep me from blushing too hard when these poems are actually perused.

In the beginning of 2009 I decided (perhaps foolishly!) that my next project would be to go back to every notebook of poetry I'd ever filled with scribblings and transfer them to a digital state.

Part of this was practical. I have so many of them, they sit around, they take up space. I wanted to feel as if they could be truly PUT AWAY. But I feared losing them, feared they would be damaged in a flood, feared I would spill coffee on them. So I slowly started the process of transferring 800 some-odd poems from old pen and paper to this newfangled notebook you are reading right now.

I would stuff three or four of the notebooks in my knapsack and bring them to work. Obviously my job is not filled with pressing tasks. I averaged between 30 and 40 poems a day while I was doing it. I worked at it from February of 2009 until late July. I've added a few new poems since then but in essence every poem I've ever written that I can find are here.

Some I'm proud of, some make me cringe. Some come from real events that I can pinpoint down to a facial expression, some I have NO IDEA WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT or who.

I wrote hundreds of poems before I actually wrote one that I thought was worth reading. You might get through the whole blog without agreeing with me. I started writing because I was a lead singer in a punk band called Fecund Youth in high school (hence the address of the blog). We needed lyrics and I just did it without thinking about it.

For the first few years everything rhymed. Then when I was in college and realized that poetry didn't mean it had to rhyme, I went through a phase of jotting anything that came to mind down, slapping a title on it and calling it a poem. Some of these are priceless! I read one William Carlos Williams poem and I was off and running.

I began writing my own songs in earnest in the early 1990's and it was only then that I truly began to work at it. If I was going to get a bunch of guys together, learn the song and play it in public, the lyrics had damn well better be good.

So. Here it is. My poetic history. Enter at your own peril. Oh, man, some of the ones from the 80's are fun, though! Teenager extraordinaire...All my lyric.