As always, I was completely unprepared for my Daily Deviation and very happy to get it. I'm glad that 2500 people got to experience my idle response to a contest about public transport.

I am always surprised by which poems go well, which ones people like. Usually they are things I don't quite understand and feel the least confident with. Or feel I had the least to do with. When I send things to magazines, I include a few poems I think are good, and maybe one or two wildcards. It's the wildcards that get published more often than not. Random poems about feet and gardens and strangeness. So I've discovered it's very hard for me to intentionally write a good poem, and a bit like flying in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I have to find the knack. I have to throw myself at the ground and miss.

This means that I've been writing more and more slowly and less often. Which means that no matter how many cool competitions and places to submit I may come across that I might have some chance of doing well with, I just don't have the poems to send out. Right now everything worth sending and few things that aren't is divided between three places, and that's it.

Unless something changes my future in poetry will look like this: When he was 90, Mark Noonan finished a 52-page manuscript. Every publisher in the world declined to print it, and he overtaxed himself trying to use an antique printing press which led to a fatal heart attack.

Goodbye cruel world. Hello instant online gratification.