Open-Heart Surgery in My Mind and Trepanning The Nerve Centre of Everything – Why I write!

The reason I write is a reason that gets all blurry in my head. I can’t remember if I write because I want to because I need to, or if it’s somewhere in between. There was a time when I didn’t write for any other reason than to make some money to survive or at least to contribute to something approaching an income. I’d write anything. 500 words for insurance, 500 words for DUI lawyers (that made up many of my first forays into actual writing, to be honest, DUI lawyer landing pages), and just content about this, that, everything, and anything. But before that, I’ve always been a writer in my head. I think. I never really wrote poetry. Okay, so in my teens, I may have dabbled. I may have dabbled but never committed anything or carefully stored anything away. Then, in college, I studied film/TV production and wrote a script or two. Rough and Ready, inspired by Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, and Lynch. All the Lynch. That was my first vague as-hell plan – to become a frustrated, underpaid indie filmmaker. Then, in all its beauty and confusion, life put a spanner in those works.�

I had plans and ideas for scripts and stories. I have always wanted to follow in the footsteps of Tolkien, Carrol, Dahl, Shelley, and Poe in writing something. Even just one thing, I thought. If I could maybe pull a Welsh and create something, one thing that had a lasting legacy. But perhaps I have always been too much of a dreamer. Then the pandemic happened, and I found a platform and a love for writing poetry that expanded and progressed quicker than my love of reading it (Which is slowly catching up). Then I found I had a voice, and it has never shut up since.

So� yes, I write because I want to�we choose to do things�but I’ve also found that I write because I need to. The voices don’t shut up, and I can’t abstain because my head (which, let me tell you, is already a messy, noisy, insane asylum) won’t give me a break.

When I am not concentrating on work and life (and sometimes even when I am), I think in vignettes, micros, haiku, horrors, first-person, second-person, and third-person narratives, and long-form free verse, which is like open-heart surgery in my mind. I mess up syntax and grammar, and there are awkward drops in flow and cadence as I vent like I’m trepanning it with a pen directly to the nerve centre of everything. Using a keyboard to make little sparks of electricity as they connect with my fingertips, fuelled by the passion inside me. Yet, you’d think it would ease off. But just as I free myself of some strange tale, social commentary, or a reflective, retrospective poem, there’s more waiting to be released.

I write because I must. Why do we feel? Because we are alive, and if we don’t feel, we are dead and pointless. I am not some genius, but I have ideas, thoughts, feelings, tricky plots, unreliable narrators, bad people without redemption, and bad people with redemption to share with the world. Many of them were inspired by me, way too many. That is why I write.

As pretentious as it sounds, it’s the truth, or is it? Is it wrong to have a strong feeling for something or a purpose for something?

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Perhaps I am just lying to you all, and I’m doing this to look cool to my peers. Maybe no one will ever know.