Continuing the self-indulgent practice of writing about myself…I’m going to post my most recent poem and want to talk about it, first.

I’ve been thinking of origin myths, especially the Garden of Eden story, for months. A few poems have fallen out of this. At the moment, I’m trying to wrap the idea of serpents as evil because they can shed their skin (memories) and we, humans, can’t. In short, arguing that in envy we damn the serpents, but also arguing that to be human is to remember. [Sidenote: Mind Hacks has a round-up of recent work to reduce/eliminate “bad” memories.]

So I’ve been working away at odd moments, not getting very far, and then, yesterday, a poem wrote itself. The serpent morphed into a caterpillar, and Eve impacted the Ancient Egyptian civilisation, and I just scribbled it down.

I consider such a poem a gift. But it doesn’t come from nowhere. An awful lot of thinking must go on behind closed doors in my subconscious.