Poems no less... Poems, everybody! The laddie reckons himself a poet!

As I was reading Elaine's poem blog last night, it put me in the mood for some Pink Floyd. So I did something I've been meaning to do for a while, which is Download some complete Floyd albums off a BT site. I got Works and Ummagumma and Meddle, all albums I haven't listened to in years, but which I have always been in awe of. I used to listen to them and write poems. I'm envious of the kind of talent that can convey such stark and naked emotion so powerfully.
It got me to thinking about myself as a writer. And what I've been ignoring for many years now is that I write poetry. Or at least, I used to.
Before the fire I wrote poetry almost exclusively. Well, poetry and letters. But the letters were how I worked through emotions, and the poetry was how I expressed myself. Prose, short stories, etc. I never really considered because they weren't me. Like Brannon put in my comments, I wrote for me, and because I wanted them read. But once I got into college and started to learn the technique, history, etc. of good writing, I started to write less. In fact, I remember the first time I got a critical analysis of my writing: my girlfriend at the time basically shredded something I'd written, and that had never happened before. I didn't realize it until years later, but from that moment on I started to express myself less, though it wasn't until after the fire that my creativity really went dead.
Then, sometime after I met Erin, I began to remember how much I used to write, and that it gave me a lot of pleasure. So I bought a journal, and wrote a few pages.
Now, years later, my shelves have maybe a half-dozen journals on them, mostly empty, only the occasional anecdote or story written.
In one, I went almost 2 years between entries.
So while reading Elaine's blog I had an epiphany: I have not written freely in over a decade. And while I do enjoy writing arguments, as in my letters to Scott Fyfe, and I enjoy reasoning out my beliefs on paper, as I used to do in my letters and have done recently, and I enjoy trying to write stories as well, none of it has ever done close to the same thing for me that spending all those countless hours of my young adult life writing poems in my notebook did.
I remember the little house on 35th and Elgin, when my only possessions besides my clothes were a used recliner, an egg-crate on which I slept, and a $5 eight-track turntable stereo combo I bought at the flea market. I'd sit in my chair, turn the music up, and write. I'd go to work the graveyard shift at Friends, and after I got my work done around 1, I'd turn the stereo up high, steal a pack of Benson and Hedges Ultra-light 100's, and write. I made the decision to go to college one night at that store while writing a poem about one of my customers. I wrote on old album covers while sitting on the floor after my chair was stolen; I wrote on the beat-up coffee tables at Midtown; I wrote in my lap in the front seat of my car at the rappelling tower... I just never stopped. Until I did.
And now this little revelation's got my attention. So it does.