Re-igniting my Passion for Something Lost

It usually takes something fairly major to shift a few things around in my life. The recent 'major' thing in question is obviously my return to university and all of the fun things that come with that - yes, I'm trying to have a good time! It has moved a few things around for me which I'm not going to get into but one of the many positives that have come out of the last week and a bit is that I've discovered my long lost passion for writing poetry. I can hear people groaning at the thought of more things being written by me ('the blog is enough you ass!') but I've actually got quite an interesting back-catalogue of poetry from about the start of 5th year until the end of high school which I occasionally revisit - sometimes for a laugh but for other reasons as well.

I've been keeping a journal for about 3 years which I write in every night of my life: what has happened during my day, how I'm feeling and any observations that I've made throughout the day. It makes up (for me anyway) quite an interesting story of my life and it certainly helps with recall. I can find out what I was doing and thinking on this day 2 years ago which I think is kind of cool. It also helps me learn from my mistakes and other such cliches which I won't dabble in for now for our mutual sanity. That is all very well but those poems that I referred to above act as a supplement to my diary. I sometimes find it fun to look back at the kind of things I was writing about and trying to work out what each figure of speech actually meant to me back then. Poems are great fun to decipher sometimes and doing it to your own work is probably even more fun.

So what is the point in having both? Well I would call it the schedule to my provisions (big shout-out to my law homies! How very lame...) with the provisions being my journal and then the bit that adds more meat to that (the schedule) being my poetry. And it is through this awful legal metaphor that I come to my newly found passion for writing poetry. No, I wasn't flicking through statutes when I thought about it but it was something that dawned on me just before the start of university again last week that kicked me into gear. There is something beautiful about being able to express yourself in this way; it's completely different to blogging or keeping a journal and it's something that I urge everyone to get involved with. I'm certainly not saying that my poems are particularly good (some of them are awful) but it's sometimes not the quality that counts when it's personal stuff. You can say what you want and it can only make sense to you and it'll be fine.

I love words and writing as you might well have gathered by now and writing poetry combines the two beautifully. Maybe one day I'll stick a couple on here for your delectation but for now they will they will remain my place of warmth and light on a cold, dark night.

Thanks for reading,

Martin