Who Wrote These Cruise Poems?

I’ve been wondering what sort of person wrote all these cruise poems.
Yes, my name’s on the title page but after months of shaping, sanding, rearranging the deckchairs, I’m not sure the writer is quite me anymore.

Maybe I’ve become a version of myself invented by the poems: the watcher leaning on the rail at dawn, tasting toothpaste and late night cocktails; the one sitting in the ship’s theatre, amused and uneasy as the magician pulls doves from a hat while the sea keeps rolling on outside. Someone half in awe, half embarrassed by the spectacle of travel, by the buffets, the sunsets, the endless sense of being entertained.

I read them now and see a person who notices too much. Who studies the choreography of other people’s holidays, who feels both tenderness and guilt in equal measure. A traveller who wants to observe without being seen observing. Someone quietly comic, quietly appalled, sensitive to surfaces but listening for the undertow.

After spending over a year with these poems I stopped writing anything new for a while. Maybe I’d been too long at sea. And when words finally came again, they were different: sprawling, loud, full of interruptions and were another version of myself.

That’s what writing does. It builds a persona that can stand where you once stood, looking out to sea, while you move on. So if you read these poems, imagine that person on deck, attentive, conflicted, balancing between wonder and unease. They’re there, somewhere in the poems. But they’re not the real me anymore, who ever that is.