Nicholas Jones16 Feb 2007

Blimey, that's a lot of critiquing you've been doing in one day.

It's not about convoluted language. It's about wanting to be able to not think. But to require a mental activity to stop yourself thinking. Because otherwise the horror comes.

Looking at the stuff I've written there are many poems about not being to sleep; it's a subject that means a lot to me. It's why I'm writing this past midnight having got home from a gig; because I'm scared when I do go to bed I might be awake for hours yet. So this poem is about waking up, it's summer, it gets light early, intently watching the changing colours of the sky as the sun rises distracts me from that four am sense of emptiness.

I'm not saying it's a perfect poem, far from it, but the horror and the terror isn't directly in it because it's a poem about avoiding that rather than confronting it.