Some poems arrive in silence. Quelling the Noise was written in the middle of everything.

On Thursday evening, 13 August 2026, I was sitting in Parliament Street, Dublin, with my Moleskine notebook open before me. The street was busy: people talking, traffic passing, footsteps crossing and recrossing the pavement. And, naturally, there were men to watch.

Some were rather attractive.

That observation became the playful beginning of the poem. I watched the men passing, wondered who they were and noticed the occasional glance exchanged between strangers.

Poetry does not always begin with a grand revelation. Sometimes it begins because somebody walking past is rather lovely to look at.

Writing in public

I often write in public places. That might seem strange for an autistic writer who can find busy surroundings overwhelming, but writing gives the activity around me somewhere to go.

The notebook creates a small, portable room. I remain part of the street, café or railway carriage, yet I also have a place from which to observe it. Sounds, movements and passing impressions can be gathered into words rather than competing for my attention without order.

Writing in public is therefore not simply about finding inspiration. It is one of the ways I process the world.

The street supplies fragments: a gesture, a voice, the rhythm of somebody walking, the brief possibility of connection. Most of the people I notice will remain strangers. I do not know their names or where they are going. On the page, however, those fleeting encounters can become part of something larger.

From observation to imagination

The poem moves from looking to wondering. The men passing through it become almost comically handsome: bold chests, strong arms and the imagined strength to pull a car.

The exaggeration is deliberate. It allows desire to remain light-hearted. The poem notices male beauty without needing to apologise for it or turn it into something excessively serious.

As a gay writer, that matters to me. Queer experience includes struggle, exclusion and the long work of learning to inhabit the world truthfully. But it also includes pleasure, humour, attraction and the ordinary delight of noticing a handsome man in the street.

Those things are worthy of poetry too.

The noise within

Only in its closing lines does the poem reveal what the act of writing is doing:

It’s how I process all my thoughts
And quell the noise within.

The din is both external and internal. Around me is the sound of the city; within me are thoughts, sensations and observations arriving together. Writing does not make the street silent. It gives its noise a form.

That is one reason I continue to carry a notebook. A handwritten poem preserves something immediate that might otherwise disappear. It catches not only what I thought, but where I was when I thought it: sitting in Parliament Street, watching Dublin pass, smiling occasionally, and turning the bustle into verse.

Quelling the Noise is published in full on NeuroDivine.ie⁠.