Sharing The First Poem I Ever Wrote, 27 Years Later (and why you should too)

When I first started toying with idea of writing poetry at the age of 14 or 15, I was writing for an audience of professional (and generally long dead)philosophers and poets I would not even scratch the surface of understanding for years, the rock ‘n roll fans in my head, and of course, like all of us, for the mass publication and celebrity that was just around the bend. And of course, for the girls. For every girl that though it was cute that I wrote poems and lyrics there were ten that thought it was weird. But I was never after those girls.

I was more excited about the prospect of being a “poet” than I was about writing poetry. Despite that I managed to come up with some fairly original combinations of words and phrases every once in a while, increased my vocabulary, ultimately learned how to write reasonably well, got to sing in a rock band, and probably even staved off suicide by releasing my adolescent aches and pains onto paper. This is not an exaggeration. Looking back, from the vantage point of an on-most-days-stable-adult, it is clear that I was struggling more than I realized at the time. And writing was my escape. My salvation.

My first poems were imitations of other people’s styles and sensibilities. Jim Morrison, Arthur Rimbaud and a bunch of other angsty and generally…