Today is National Poetry Day, a day that aims to celebrate poetry and engage people with it. I enjoyed studying poetry at school but I didn’t think about it a great deal after that, at least not until my vocal tics began to get more noticeable and complex. When this happened, it re-ignited my interest in the beauty of words.

I’m not a poet myself, but my tics do sometimes sound quite poetic:

“Androgynous android laughter.”
“Softly spoken autumn.”
“The rain is splatter-painting with the water from the sea.”
“Cabbage white butterflies flying in your brain.”
“Good afternoon you dense sky of milk.”

They also occasionally come up with new versions of well-known poems – there are examples here and here.

One of the aims of Touretteshero from the start has been to share my tics so they can be used as springboards for other people’s creativity – check out “Moon, did you get fat with the stars?” by @teacher2poet and “Aim your dog at the moon” by Barbara Blake.

So if you’ve been inspired by National Poetry Day, do have a look through my tics and let some involuntary phrases kick-start your imagination – and if you end up writing a tic-inspired poem do share it with us in our gallery.