Surviving the Things on our Minds

I want to come back to the questions of the previous post, Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction and Other Blunt Objects in a moment, but before any of that what you really need right now more than anything is a poem. Trust me. None of your namby pamby stuff here, no outdated (by a couple of centuries) school curriculum, nothing to shock the socks of your mother too much either, just a darn decent poem that fills the void other poems leave behind.

Survivor

Everyday,
I think about dying.
About disease, starvation,
violence, terrorism, war,
the end of the world.
It helps
keep my mind off things.

By Roger McGough

I really like this. Forget poetic structure and all those nasty things for a moment, think about what he is saying. Open up the newspaper, listen to the radio, the television, read the headlines on the internet, but hey we’ve got things to do today, right? We’ve got poems to write after all.