Poems and Lyrics, take Billy Bragg for example.

I'm writing a country song now and trying to slam down one line so ridiculously moving and good that if I never write another for the rest of my life I will be proud of what I've done. Maybe I should go back through all of my old poems, pick the best lines, and make songs out of them. Now that I realize that song lyrics aren't just dumb poems and that they're actually sort of difficult to write well, I'm studying the masters for guidance.

Billy Bragg's lyrics are so unexpected but so accessible, they cut deep, they mean something. I think it's important to speak directly from experience, not to fracture and flay difficult emotions through the prism of abstraction. Which is what I tend to do when I write poems. Which makes me write either bad or boring poems.

"Walk Away Renee" played this morning and, as usual, stopped my heart for a second. I made up the line breaks but the important stuff is all Bragg.

Please read:

Walk Away Renee

She said it was just a figment of speech
and I said, "You mean figure."
And she said, "No, figment."
Because she could never imagine it happening. But it did.
When we first met, I played the shy boy.
When she spoke to me for the first time my nose began to bleed.
She guessed the rest.
The next day we went on a bus ride to the ferry
and when nobody came to collect our fares,
well, I knew then this was something special.

I couldn't stop thinking about her,
and every time I switched on the radio
there was somebody else singing a song about the two of us.
It was just like being on a fast ride at the fun fair:
The sort you want to get off because it's scary
and then as soon as you're off you want get straight back on again.

But all love is strange,
and you have to learn to take
the crunchy with the smooth I suppose.

She began going out with Mr. Potato Head--
it was when I saw her in the car park
with his coat around her shoulders that I realized.
I went home and thought about the two of them together
until the bathwater went cold around me.

I thought about her eyes and the curve of her breasts
and about the point where their bodies met.
I confronted her about it,
I said, "I'm the most illegible bachelor in town."
And she said, "Yeah, that's why I could never
understand any of those silly letters you sent me."

And then one day it happened,
she cut her hair and I stopped loving her.