Ideas for a poem or even whole lines and verses can come to you at the most inconvenient of times. You’re not always sitting at a desk primed for poetic action with pen in hand or keyboard in front of you. You’re as likely to have something buzz in from the ether when you’re out shopping, stuck in traffic or, as is often the case for me, just as you’re about to go to sleep. I’m sure some poets get inspiration when they’re on the loo—not me, though, but it’s perfectly possible.

Of course that time when you’re not quite awake but not totally lost to dreamland is fertile ground. Insomniacs can hover there for hours. It’s the danger zone when the problems of the day can be magnified beyond all sense and turned into major crises. It’s also when you get that feeling familiar to all of falling endlessly, when your heart seems to jump and you sit bolt upright in shock for a moment or two. You’re not Superman. You can’t fly. What just happened?

Last night I didn’t have that sense of free-fall but I do get it occasionally. We all do. Bodies, however, came to me in one big hit and if I’d just gone to sleep there and then, it would have been lost forever. I know from past experience I wouldn’t have remembered a single line. Thankfully I keep a high-tech equivalent of notepad and pen by the bed: my iPhone, the alarm clock on it waking me every morning if I’m not already awake by the time it goes off. I grabbed the iPhone when Bodies started to grow inside my head and used an app called Evernote to get the lines down. I didn’t really know what I’d written and didn’t spend time thinking about it as it was being tapped out on the virtual keyboard nor immediately afterwards. I went to sleep.

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I logged onto the Evernote website first thing this morning (armed with coffee) to see what I’d written—your text, video and audio notes are synchronised automatically—and was amazed to find Bodies a first draft I couldn’t improve upon. The rhythms and rhymes are, from my perspective, spot-on.

Bodies was complete and it is a dark narrative, a cautionary tale for our sex-obsessed and materialistic times.

I wondered if Bodies was at odds with my own spiritual belief that the body is as holy as the spirit. I quickly realised Bodies isn’t supportive of the idea put about by early Christians that the flesh is bad, the spirit good; rather, the poem is about imbalance, when the needs of the body are exclusively focused upon without the mind being engaged, when the demands of the body are not tempered by logic, reasoning or morality. It is also about the fragility of the body, its susceptibility to unwelcome transformation through illness, disease and drugs.

We can harm our spirits with our bodies. We can also harm other people’s bodies and spirits with our pursuit of physical ambitions.

As always, you are invited to comment below if you’d like to share your responses to the poem. You’re more than welcome to do so.

Bodies

Bodies are strange.
Bodies betray.
They seek out things
that are bad for us
things like
other people’s lives
drugs that enslave
ways to misbehave.

Bodies are strange.
Bodies fail us.
They get cancer
broken hearts
migraines
assorted pains
and we cry
wither and die.

I was watching TV tonight and around 9.35pm the ending of the novel I’m writing for NaNoWriMo came to me. Bam. Just like that, a lightning bolt straight into my conscious mind. I wasn’t thinking about the novel. I was just doing nothing, and maybe that’s why I got the idea when I did—I was free, for a time, from the internal knots and tensions that every writer is familiar with, and has to wrestle to the ground constantly and never-endingly if he or she is to win through and get the work done.

To say I was excited was an understatement given that the now-known final chapter will turn the entire story round, flip everything on its head, confound and surprise and terrify the reader who, I hope, will already have enjoyed plenty of mystery and surprises from the very first page. It feels weird saying that when I’m only writing chapter four today and am planning a total of thirty—one for each day of the competition. It’s also, remember, only the first draft I’m pumping out right now. There could be one, two, three or more before everything’s ready for take-off.

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