Because we all want to write more poems.
Twelve Messages in Electromagnetic Bottles
1.
Innovation in increments:
Telegraph > telephone
Radio > television
When they made love
They named the baby wifi
2.
So it was/shall be
With Time Travel
No chrononauts
Hunting dinosaurs
Just the fibrillating
— . —
Of sent frags
3.
Concision counts!
Poets are/shall be
Greatly in demand
4.
Sent/To Be Sent
To me, age 14:
Drop chem, try bio
Skip pre-calc, seek
School newspaper
5.
You are as much
Your mother’s son
As your father’s
Show compassion
6.
All young women are
Beautiful/most young
Men are blind.
7.
Clothes communicate
Thus they matter
Stop fighting it
8.
Your personal problems
Are more manageable than
You imagine
9.
Your planet’s problems
Are much worse than
You imagine
10.
Express your interest
In women directly but politely
Nothing else works for you
11.
The friends you have now
Are yours for life
This is mostly a blessing
12.
We are animals that
Dreamed we are not
Animals. Observe the
Dream/try
Not to wake
From it.
- Michael Mayhew's Shared Poems
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Comments
Neil McKay
December 1, 2012
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A fascinating poem. I
A fascinating poem. I especially like the first line of the last stanza. Thats quoteworthy.
Benjamin Gorman
December 1, 2012
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Good fun
I can read it as a seres of messages to self, or as a series of disconnected observations, or as a progression toward a deeper understanding. #3 is heartening.
joshua mertz
December 1, 2012
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Excellent. Homage in a sorta
Excellent. Homage in a sorta way to Wallace Stevens' "13 Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird." The lines flow nicely with a wonderful tension cum tipping point. Am I vague enough? I liked it a lot.--
P.S. -- Stanzas 8 and 9 "then" should be "than" unless you are exercising your poetic license in which case I will shut up.
Michael Mayhew
December 2, 2012
Permalink
Thanks!
Ben - yup, all three of those things. This started out as a way of (I hope) exorcising a persistent daydream: the "when I go back and do high school again with my fifty years of life experience, I'm really gonna be good at it!" daydream. But then as I was writing, other stuff happened and it got, I think, more interesting then that.
Joshua - I wish I could say that the use of "then" vs "than" was connected to the time-travel them and "then"s grammatical time-related function, but it was simply a mistake. I make a lot of those. Nice catch. Now corrected.
The title was definitely meant to be a Wallace Stevens tip of the beanie, although the numbering (which inspired the title) came about organically. As I was writing I found that double spaces between stanzas wasn't quite doing what I wanted, which was to make them very discrete, and yet still belong together - like the songs on a concept album. Numbering seemed to do that. And then I re-read the whole thing and saw that the numbers also gave it a bit of a "Blackbirds" feel, so I used the title to acknowledge the master.