an aussie in austria

As an early teen, I went through a very special phase… writing dirty poems. I don’t know why… I guess that’s just how things manifested when I got curious about things like boys and sex. Now, maybe some 13/14 year olds know a lot about sex… but I certainly was not one of them. My dirty poetry was written with next to no knowledge on the topic, other than what I’d read or seen on television – which was not a large pool to draw from.

At the time I remember a lot of my girlfriends getting involved – possibly all teenagers go through such a phase – but from what I remember, I was overly enthusiastic. Oh, and they were bad. Really just awful. Like the kind of angsty poetry teenagers write, but with naughty words. I wish I could remember some lines to prove just how horrendous they were. But naturally at the time we thought we were extremely witty and knowledgeable… or at least I did.

Around this time we were learning the planets in science – and were encouraged to come up with a mnemonic to help us remember the order. So now I’m stuck with this juvenile mnemonic… that embarrassingly I use even to this day to work out the order of the planets. I won’t inflict it on you, but to give you a small taste, there’s a Marcus and a Natalie, and you can probably guess what I picked for Pluto! Poor, innocent Pluto.

If my memory serves, my dirty poem phase came to an end quite naturally, and there was a token burning of all the evidence. But somehow I didn’t get rid of it all, and that’s when my mum happened upon the last remnants of my creative writing phase, which as you can imagine, didn’t go down too well (sorry mum).

In any case, looking back, I don’t think I was any different to other curious teenagers at the time, and while part of me would love to go back and have a good laugh at myself, the other part just cringes about how embarrassing it would be and makes me glad I burnt them all!

How about you – did you write dirty poetry as a teen? Still write it? Feel free to share!