After a long hiatus, I have started writing poems in the longer form again. They are not very long, in fact, quite modest in length, but still a good deal longer than the three-line jobbies I have been writing these past two decades.

I suppose that I have wanted to capture more than a moment in time for a while now. The extended thought gives me a chance to be more expressive, though others would say, long-winded. Still, the output is paltry and patchy at best.

I used to write a lot of longer-form poems after I left high school, most of which were hand-written in a book given to me by a kindly colleague during my first teaching appointment. I think that I wrote and collected about 50 or 60 poems in that volume, of which only a few survive. Somehow the book went missing in a house move and has never been found. Except for a few stray pieces on loose paper, there is nothing to show for the effort I made, though as for that, they were not very good at all. So, no loss really.

More recently, I have been interested in different kinds of rhyme, ways of linking sound across lines and within lines so as to not be too prescriptive. I'm enjoying writing too, even if the completed work falls well short of what I would like. I am not a major or a minor poet, just a happy amateur. And that will do.