You could do better, and you probably ought.
When first I came to Minneapolis from my tiny little town, I would wander the streets and wonder. Ofttimes I'd board a random bus and just ride until it stopped, before walking my way home. I'd stare half-focused out the window, lost in contemplation of the movement and the marvels that passed by, the press of unprecedented crowds that somehow secured a solitude I'd never found even on the prairie. Like many young, introspective narcissists, I felt the need to express my observations in poetry.

The cold black trickery
of the quick flash flickering
as flesh flies and melds
into concrete and chrome.
The dry paper rustling
of a million minds bustling--
each one together,
and together, alone.

Yeah, whatever. I liked that little epigram. About the only thing of mine I ever memorized. In a nutshell, it's all of my writing: full of consonance and pretension, and multiple layers of none-too-subtle meaning. I've always loved to play games with sound and syntax, to tickle eardrum and cerebrum simultaneously (a trick that normally takes an eight-inch surgical probe and some deft wrist-wriggling).

But I really have done it always, or at least as "always" as I can recall. So what were my influences? No one around me talked this way when I was young. I did a great deal of reading, but my formative years were hardly filled with Shakespearean sonnets and the like. In high school I liked to attribute my style, such as it was, to narrative poets like Alfred Noyes:

And all around the organ there's a sea without a shore
Of human joys and wonders and regrets;
To remember and to recompense the music evermore
For what the cold machinery forgets...

Yes; as the music changes,
Like a prismatic glass,
It takes the light and ranges
Through all the moods that pass;
Dissects the common carnival
Of passions and regrets,
And gives the world a glimpse of all
The colours it forgets.

Lovely stuff, if a bit... fluff. Still. Hardly the worst inspiration I could claim. Just a dishonest one. I truly had no idea where I picked up my word-wrangling ways. None, that is, until a few months back when I happened to hear an old, familiar refrain:

"His beak blinks like a blinkin' beacon!"(~4:38 in)

...and it just clicked. Yep. That's me. Not TS Eliot. Not Saint-Exupéry. Not even Gilbert/Sullivan. Rankin/Bass, through and through. Ah, well. It's all in what I do with it, I suppose.

I'll get right on that.