what comes first?

The old chicken or the egg question. Or in this case... the words or the idea? What drives your poetry? Personally I find that most often the words come first... before their meaning. Sometimes they are just disjointed phrases.. but I know I am on to something.

Today I went back to one of my old friends . the cut-up machine, in an effort to drag words into life, It is amazing how you can feed the thing a mixture of poetry, lyrics, advertisements, friend's emails, whatever and it will jumble them up so unrecognizably...then a few new phrases pop up that tickle the imagination. "fiddling religious" "human metaphors" "moon written" "breathing peace" "monkey ideas". Where is this leading? Who knows.