I've wangled my way into working at the news desk for a prestigious national paper. It’s been barely a week of blundering like a blind-eyed bat through board meetings with senior editors as they pool and pitch a selection of political news stories; not only do I fear that I possess the political acuity of a mushroom, but that I've been feigning an interest in politics far too long.

I know it must be incredibly important, this politics malarkey. It's the silver hand that sends the world spinning round on its axis: it doesn't take a degree from Cambridge to decipher that one out. Nonetheless, I can't help but feel very passionately that, deep down (dare I confess?) I simply care more about poetry. Shoot me down, poison my pigeonhole, but at the end of the day our passions are what hold our bones together. 

Is poetry more important than politics? In a practical sense, probably not, but people have different perspectives and will place their values accordingly. I know I couldn't munch through metaphors if I was half-starved and shivering on the streets - though I'd probably give it a go. Still, as someone pointed out, a brew does taste better with a spoonful of sugar and a splash of semi-skimmed than with a dash of Dylan Thomas. A meagre helping of metaphor is made of illusion and nourishes only the imagination. Though, in my strange and surreal world saved from politics, there probably would be no shop from which to purchase such products in the first place. The shopkeeper would be on strike and the sugar would be stolen, or somewhere in a field still yet to be imported because, obviously, if the planet had no politics, there would be no laws. 

I suppose I have always struggled with systems, from burglar alarms to banking online. Even in the deployment of strategic logic in the act of layering a lasagne in sheets, or decrypting bus time tables, I was dismally behind my peers. However, for me it comes naturally to stare at a speck of dust for days and deduce its symbolic significance, dissect its dark secret whilst contemplating the concept of cracks. The artistic mind churns its cogs in a very unique way.

I'm typing this on the tube after another day at the desk, phone battery clinging its desperate claws to the five per cent crumb of power that remains, a symphony of screws, screeching wheels and sliding doors. I might fumble and fail to find an argument persuasive enough to the masses that poetry is more important than politics. Yet this column will in the meantime try to unravel as an elaborate symbolic spiral into the depths of pseudo-philosophic pondering, entertaining abstraction and instructive appreciation of the grimmest most gristle-grey moments of our shared human existence. Poetry is pretty much everywhere: bubbling in the broken coffee machine, creeping through the cold-calls, boasting in the empty bank balance. Poetry is disconcerting and at best dangerous, lurking in that deep-stomach lurch when you lean too close to the platform edge.

I've been told to keep up the delusion - someone has to; the day might come when society needs delusional people to point us to the truth, or at least to make others reflect. In any case, I've been slowly but surely edging my way from this desk to the other side of the office. The sceptic might say that I'm only here to worm my way onto the literary desk, which, conveniently, is situated on the same floor. It is simply a slither away, within casual “dropping by” distance en route to the broken coffee machine where we converge to fill our cups half-full with inspiration. Yet thankfully as a third year MML student, my tracks are covered by paper evidence of paying £9,000 a year to supposedly pursue my passion in foreign affairs, political, or otherwise.

"If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live.” John F. Kennedy

@JadeCuttle