I'm a poet and I don't even know it!

So it's 13 minutes, no make that 12 minutes to 4pm on 13th November and I've been ordered to update my site, blog, whatever you wish to call it. Yesterday, or the day before, I had finally succumbed to boredom and announced to my girlfriend that the situation from my perspective looked bleak. Her response was to throw me a book entitled 'An Introduction to Poetry'...

Now I like poetry, and in saying this I mean POETRY. I like reading and thought I might find something I likes. Well I was very sadly as wrong as wrong can be. Poetry seems to have changed from the days when I ran around biting ankles and generally being an annoying little brat.

'If', by the bloke who makes cakes, is in my eyes a cracking poem, much like 'The Man In The Glass', 'The Charge of The Light Brigade' and more recently 'Evidently Chickentown'.

But,

'The road was black,
Father was chopping a hawk in pieces,
Fish jumped among the cow fields while summer came and the dog barked.'

Now for some reason this constitutes poetry. How?

Incidently most of these inane ramblings are the work of our American brothers. No surprises there.

This only mildly angers me. The worst is that people try to 'decode' the poems. I remember being at school and studying a poem called 'Orderly Fetch That Knife'. Now that's not the correct title and I apologise for this. The thing is it was a poem that rhymed and told a story about how bodies were in and out of field tents on the front line and just how little respect the dying men had. No emotion etc etc.

Yet my English teacher at the time was trying to teach us to look for the hidden meanings. For example, how the poem was really relating to the lamp posts down London's main high street, whatever that may be. And how the knife represented a political movement at the time.

Three words for Mr. Spredborough: BULL FUCKING SHIT!

Why in the name of all that's holy can the poem not just be about how horrible it was?! Why do they have to render a great poem painfully mind-numbing by saying it has a hidden meaning? By doing this he basically diminished any meaning the words actually had.

People should take poems for what they are, enjoy reading them, and the meaning behind them. Granted, some authors may encapsualte within their work a hidden meaning, but the majority do not. Poems are there to be enjoyed, not to be dissected at any opportunity, in my eyes robbing the author. Meanings, advice and so forth are actually clearly visible within a poem. It's no good asking someone what the meaning is, then telling them they are wrong. Yes people have different perceptions of words but English teachers are just warped! They need to take 20 paracetamol tablets and leave the rest of the world in peace. The bloke was talking about a knife, not a political movement. He wouldn't have left a poem all disjointed, talking about gas lamps and then fish fingers being nice in a sandwich. Unless of course he was a Yank.

Save a life

Hello there. I'm new to this blog thingy. I'm actually only here due to persistence from my girlfriend. She put the effort in to creating this space for me and who am I to waste it? Being barmy, she's under the impression that whenever I open my mouth I manage to sound more intellectual than anyone else. I've been told many times before that I am a very deep thinker and on one occassion maybe a little bit too good to be here. I won't mention the person who said that, but I think they were under the influence at the time, or high on something. I don't want to seem big-headed or cocky. To tell the truth I have a huge problem with the human race; we are the most insensitive, pathetic, self-obsessed creatures ever (but not all of us). I have long wanted to change, wanted to become a better person, but seem to lack the, let's say, oomph, to execute the changes.

I had already written two pieces to post; the first about not-so-common common sense, and the other about my troubles with women. I was all set to post these, but I hesitated and wanted them read by my girlfriend before I launched my scathing attack online. Boy, am I glad I stalled! Now, we all have our faults and all wish to change some part of us, but on Sunday 9th October, returning after a meal with Becca, I put the TV on and crashed. I think this was the changing point of my life, or rather I hope it's going to be. I saw two programmes in succession. The first was on BBC2 at 9pm: 'In Search of Myths and Heroes'. I won't go into great depths but basically, how happy are religious people? I'm someone who's always sat on the fence when it comes to God. On the one hand, with all the conflict and many different religions, I don't see how there can be just one god, but on the other there are things I've seen which I cannot explain and which lead me to deduce that there must be something there. Religious people aren't scared though. They have someone on their side all the time and I'm jealous of that.

The second programme I saw was on Channel 4 at midnight: 'The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off'. It was while watching this programme that I saw my first faultless human being. Perhaps his condition didn't give him the opportunities the rest of us have to cock up, but this guy was a hero. Along with Becca, he's saved my life! It's people like him who should be idols to people, not 'superstars'. In fact, I think those who admire and aspire to be like so-called 'superstars' are sad individuals, lacking something major, probably a life. But that's just me, and I don't want to rant.

Anyway, this is my introduction and I don't want to bore you. But my posts are not going to support my profile description, well for the most part anyway. There is a need for the muppets to be named and shamed and I'll still keep my common sense piece for another day. For now I plan to change my life. I need to become a calmer, better person; more giving, more forgiving, more accepting, and I need to gain belief in myself. I won't say I want to be less judgemental because I'm quite a good judge of character, and on a number of occassions I've proven that my judgements are correct.

I am fortunate enough to know someone older and wiser, who's basically a laid-back crazy Dutch man. Hans is a quality guy and I really need to take a leaf out of his book, in fact reams out of his book. He is helping me mature more and more and has proven a good source of peace when I get angry.

All I can say for now is I hope I haven't bored anyone and I'm sorry for jumping about, not that anyone's reading. In the event that someone has stumbled across this site though, I hope that you come back again and hopefully see me grow and prosper. At least I'm trying, which is more than I can say for others!