A small essay...

I do not generally write here as 'me' - the John you may see in the right hand corner of this page - something simple, an outline of a man;

Australian.
Living in London.

Theatre director,
playwright and poet

The reason I do today is...complicated...this is a public space, in the sense that I post things here voluntarily - I include them all as 'poetry' (a few I have been lucky to have published) but for the most part this is a select online record of something I've done since I was 15, a habit...writing 'poems' to deal with, record, enunciate and expand the world I live in and the feelings and emotions I have - often in the moment, often intensely or obliquely. More like capturing the sensation of something in words.

It's my default setting as a writer, not plays or prose really, something in between - a poem. Poetry, like Bukowski says;

...is what happens
when nothing else
can

It's come to my attention that there is, well, other attention paid here. From some dubious sources. I make no real effort to publicise this space, I like the beauty of the internet as somewhere to be publicly anonymous. I delight in the thought really that someone, somewhere is reading this, these things. It's about being read. And perhaps understood.

But I genuinely forget sometimes that, if you wanted to and were determined, it's possible to find this if you knew say my last blog's name or my surname even. Or if someone had given you this information. And it would be easy to read this, and confuse or assume that the things in here (the you's and she's and he's ) were meant as a record of the world as it is, not perhaps how I see or how it might or should or could be.

I'm not the most clear poet sometimes...

I think it was put in my head early on (it was high-school and then compounded in university) that 'good' poetry (the stuff we studied) was by necessity complicated - that it needed a professor or a book or a course to explain it. That that complexity or obtuseness made it 'literary' and not parochial.

I've come, of course to know this is not true and is in fact a dangerous pretension; study can of course reveal facets, great unlooked for gems in a poem, but it cannot substitute for the experience of reading (often out-loud) something again and again or perhaps just once. As T.S.Eliot said;

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

So in a funny way this is a post asking for...forgiveness? no, I don't regret the things I've written here - and a lot of them are real when they occur (often, unsurprisingly at 3am...) but maybe I'm asking for something more like compassion, I suppose and for those that would meddle in the lives of two people already struggling to live out and beyond each other, I'd say pretty much

fuck off.