Thoughtpoetry

Thoughtpoetry, my third chapbook, was written during 2025 September 6-20; it is 83 pages long, excluding the front and back cover. I originally planned to formally arrange it in Adobe InDesign under the title i, as I had done for its predecessors Humble Beginnings and ;, but those plans never materialised, and I probably won’t do it anymore. It was the first chapbook that I arranged purely in Google Docs, and set a precedent for each one that followed.

I consider this the chapbook that changed everything for my writing style, because it made me internalise the idea that poetry can be virtually anything I want it to be and that it doesn’t have to follow any predetermined. Thoughtpoetry is essentially a dogma; I followed two steps for creating a Thoughtpoem:

1. Get an idea.

2. Write down everything you think on a piece of paper, without editing or self-censoring.

3. You’re done.

This allowed for a massive amount of material—77 poems in total—to be amassed in a relatively short timespan.

I created the Thoughtpoems in Thoughtpoetry in virtually every space that was available to me: the school bus, in classrooms, during lunch, while waiting for the school bus, on the city bus home, while eating dinner, in my room while forgetting about homework. I also created them using virtually every tool that was available to me: my TI Nspire CX II calculator, pen and paper, pencil and notebook, transcribing my thoughts directly onto a Google Doc. The version published here is slightly bowdlerized, since some pieces refer to people in my life and at my school.

The inspiration for Thoughtpoetry came on 2025 September 6. I was in the supermarket, looking for snacks, when suddenly I was trapped in the soup aisle by a traffic jam, i.e. many people who all wanted to leave and come into the aisle at the same time. This frustration gave me the thought: “What if I could walk on walls?” I immediately felt the need to pull out my calculator (which I carried around to calculate sales tax on the things I picked up), open a new Notes document, and transcribe my thoughts then and there.

The timespan for Thoughtpoetry lasted exactly two weeks: the first poem, “i wish i could walk on walls”, was written on 2025 September 6 at 13:03, and the seventy-seventh, “i can’t walk on walls”, was written on 2025 September 20 at 13:03. This wasn’t planned from the beginning, but by the days leading up to the Twentieth, I knew I wanted to conclude the chapbook this way.