I should put my 7th self-published #poetry chapbook together. I don't want to. I think I'm too old to ever have the energy to write another chapbook's worth of poems again.
It's also a bit too short. One of the poems can only really exist in conjunction with a random number generator and would be difficult to do in print unless you tore the paper up first. I've already done that.
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On the other hand, not putting it together would mean that these were the random poems that would get tossed into a box of scattered papers after I'm dead. I've gone through the papers of another poet and made that box.
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It's funny how poetry and physics share the same kind of failures. I become an astrophysicist in part because I was really bad at lab work: could not put a circuit or piece of apparatus together without something breaking. My worst poem was the time I thought I'd read the first verse into the tape on a boombox and then play it and do other verses as myself talking over myself. The batteries died and people told me I should have practiced.
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Well, I cleverly created a poem as a Moebius strip (many picky problems publishing that: didn't really work) that tells me that I'm pretty happy with it that I am always saying. I suppose I can sort of publish it here, starting from a random point.
The strip starts in the next post:
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When I was reading the poem once
(or speaking it from memory, no
one is really sure which comes first)
I paused
And started up again later
But how much later?
There is no set time for
a break in a poem
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We read them as if they are
trains bumping over railroad ties
But
that is a convention
Once I paused
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and people thought it was done
the poem was over
and it wasn't
Will I have to die for them to be sure it's done?
But I've already died,
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any time I start
speaking, I could have stopped in mid-poem
years ago, and be about to continue
Or anyone else
could be about to continue a poem
this one or some other
Is there really another?
This wouldn't be
without words read in the past
back through what I've heard, read
what everyone near me did
back to other languages and dim time
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It won't be
without people to wonder why
a pause brings a poem, not conversation
People in the future
It includes all that by reference
The poem is the world, by reference
It only has pauses
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I'm pretty happy with it
This is the first draft
I'm not sure if there could be another draft
once I started
It
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doesn't terminate
except through the usual processes
of death or sleep or boredom
What does it mean
it doesn't end?
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