Welcome to the drawing board – a resting place for works in progress and fermenting ideas.
In the past couple of hours, I have been thinking about extremes of emotion. I was on Poetry Foundation’s website, looking for inspiration or at least something interesting to read, and came across a profile on Richard Hell. It was a new name to me – I decided to read.
Hell was a delinquent kid. He moved to New York City at 17, a dropout and runaway. In the big apple he wrote, played bass in a string of punk rock bands, and worked odd jobs when necessity compelled. The profile paints his life as an ideal of romantic abandon – he struggled with substance abuse, was a rampant womanizer and allowed emotion to move him as the wind pushes thunder to the mountains. He channeled it all into his writing and his music.
The profile described his poetry similarly to his life – eschewing constraints and conscious regulations. After reading his poetry, I agreed. Both his life according to the profile and his verse were striking and passionate. However, knowing humanity to some degree now, I quickly tempered my idealization of Hell’s life of passion with an understanding of the persuasive potential of lives distilled into a few short paragraphs, bereft of any gray flesh. Such writing will never display the full character of its subject, or the full experience of their life.
Still, it does offer a window. I don’t know Richard Hell, likely never will, but I can say with some confidence that his life is more dramatic than most. That, at least in some instances, he led with pure emotion or instinct and did not backtrack upon arrival at the fruits of that decision. The rarity of such action in the life around me made me think – should we allow our emotions to lead more often? Would life be made more interesting by occasional acquiescence to our more extreme emotions and impulses?
Clearly, there is propensity for great harm in this. There is also the question of possibility – can you pick and choose when to let your emotions lead? If you do, is it still letting emotions lead? These questions all interest me, but besides their resolution, my encounter with Hell led me to another desire – a collection of poetry distilling the extremes of emotion.
Whether acting on extreme states of mind is a good thing is certainly debatable. But, for me, allowing these emotions is something to be desired. I value greater range of life and greater emotional range, too. The plan: stoke myself to greater extremes of emotion, or recall such instances past, and put them into poetry.
Here, I’ll put down some drafts and inspiratory reference. Hopefully, I will come back to edit these.
—
2.16.2026
(A decision exists…)
A decision exists at the foot of the form / to jump in or forward
There can be no temperate departure / Only a Leap!
For the form is magnetic / and will whisper to you through both ears
and stroke you on every surface you know.
But where the form is absent / another voice echoes,
bringing you discomfort.
It shouts, Jump! / In the strange edict of the stranger.
—
2.19.2026
The Street walks out ahead of me, / my strides grow shorter in
my own eyes / which run ahead with the road
and beg me to make it / that small man with a black cloud head
and copper wire shoulders – run now / Now or we will be gone forever
and you won’t be more than dust / on the horizon.
Black cloud man, you are / clear as day.