When I was a child, I was one of the kids who wore black all the time, and when the kids asked me why I wore black, I said things like, 'I'm mourning the death of modern society.' I mean, I was a riot.
I was 9 when I wrote 'Fate Stay with Me.' It was this fictional song about romance gone wrong.
I would borrow my mom's red Borghese lipstick and smear it on like a clown!
When I was little, seven or eight years old, in third and fourth grade, I would always try to use long words and stuff.
After student years of flat-sharing and living with other people's taste, I went into decorating overdrive when I acquired my first apartment - its floor plan not much bigger than the vintage Hermes scarves I then wore side-knotted on my head, pirate-style.
There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
I'm the one who's always kissing all the boys and stuff.
I'm channelling my 14-year-old self. She's thinking about putting on her big hoop earrings and baggy pants and going to the mall downtown.
When I was 15, I was wearing sandals and corduroys, Guernsey, striped pullover, a beard that was hardly there, shades and a beret, and the goal was hanging out.
Edgy' music has always formed the cornerstone to any teenage rebellion. Most indulge in it precisely because adults like me don't like them doing so.
I said the first thing that came into my head unfortunately. "Save the drama for your mama " I told her just like an eleven-year-old.
Yes, I've had a slight feeling of wanting to reclaim some of the lifestyle I had in my 20s, which means poncing around in what amounts to pirate clothes.
Ideas are the old-age of art. Artists have to keep young; they must not think too much - thought is death, while art is life. Such was Emile's viewpoint.
When we are younger, we say a lot of things without often believing in them. The thoughts within you are much more important, and so often, one can't completely describe what one feels. As we grow older, we realize that there is more to love than what is expressed in the conventional sense of the terms.
I went through this phase of Spandex, high heels, and fur coats when I was my late teens and early twenties; before then, I lived in overalls and baggy T-shirts.
I started writing songs at eight. Heartbreak songs - don't ask me why. It was the stuff I used to hear, so I imitated it. I used to write songs about guys cheating. Could you imagine!
When I was sixteen I was pretending to be Charlie Musselwhite. I had a long raincoat on, my hair slicked back, and the shades.
Everyone is a poet at 16, but how many are poets at 50? Generally, people seem to get more conservative as they age, but in my case, I seem to have gotten more radical.
'Punk rock' is a word used by dilettantes and heartless manipulators about music that takes up the energies, the bodies, the hearts, the souls, the time and the minds of young men who give everything they have to it.
When I was younger, I went through a lot of different phases. One day I'd be punk rock, and the next I would be tomboyish, and then I would be really girly. I was so weird. My two best friends and I were just crazy and goofy!
When I was a kid I would write songs, little plays, and poetry in school. If you're an adult and you're a poet, it's all about love and pain, but if you're a kid it's, "Does anyone know a word that rhymes with shark?"
I went through this phase where I thought pink and purple matched. To dance class, I'd wear purple tights and pink leg warmers and paint my shoes purple. It was really odd.
My parents let me get my outfit in the gayest place possible, the 'International Male Catalog.' They sold mostly speedos and thongs and clubwear, and I was like, I'm getting that sheer shirt with the dragon on it, and then those vinyl patent leather pants and the cheetah platform boots.
I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
I wanted to make youthful, irreverent anthems. Parents might not get it, but kids would.
