Fishing for Birds

There has to be a first time for everything, and this is the first poem I ever wrote. Rather appropriately, I suppose, it concerned my very first meaningful relationship too.

Looking back, the encounter itself was nothing out of the ordinary… I suppose that it was no different to the rather awkward and self-conscious experience that epitomises the experience for most young adults encountering sexual desire and feelings for another person the first time around. Sadly of course, as often happens, the relationship (which seemed so important at the time) also simply fizzled to nothing almost as soon as I’d unpacked my bags for my first term at University.

Mind you, if I’d appreciated at the time that such an inauspicious end was quite commonplace then I suppose I’d not have found myself brooding about the event, feeling guilty, eighteen months later.

I was later to realise that this is the environment into which poetry is born. You can’t write a good poem (or a second rate one, for that matter) without good fresh emotional material. Being happy and content is the kiss of death to my own brand of creativity. Even my humorous poems are born at moments of black despair, in a sort of gallows humour. You can’t fake an experience to order, either. Ersatz feelings give birth to ersatz poetry.

This was my first time though. As a young, virgin, poet I didn’t know that the need to get up at 2am and write the words down, was the portent of things to come. It was a long time before I understood the rule that there would be no sleep till the job was done .. till the words had been written down and massaged into syllabic symmetry on the paper .. topped by a title.

What I did learn from that first night under the desk lamp was the sheer pleasure of releasing the feelings onto paper, between the lines of double-edged words. I’d discovered that the real poetry lies in the ideas conveyed in such a short, neat, package. The trick of getting words to say more together than their individual meanings alone.

In short, I suppose I was hooked.

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This poem was written in the early 1990’s on the day when I first properly realised the power of the Internet as a campaigning tool. I had received an email from someone in Sydney, Australia looking for some advice; I knew someone in Aberdeen, Scotland who had the answer; five minutes later, with my help, the two were in contact with one-another. I remember that the power of that event hit me so hard that I burst into tears. In that moment I saw the potential and, as they say, I never looked back.

So, this poem is dedicated to anyone and everyone out there who, through their disembodied presence on the Internet, beavers away with making connections that file away the chains.

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This poem was a true story about a man I met when walking across Boston common one time back in 1995, whilst touring in New England. I have never before or since heard of anybody else who flys a kite with the aid of a fishing rod, nor do I think I’ll ever forget the encounter. The poem is dedicated to the man who finished his lesson by shamelessly bumming a kiss .. and it was his expression “fishing for birds” which provided the inspiration.

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