Thursday, March 10, 2011
Fourteen Questions for a Pisces
(on her birthday)
Do you have any spare armor?
May I have a bite of your donut?
Why are forsythia yellow?
When are we coming back?
Where is the forest you can't see for the trees?
What is the secret of synchronous kisses?
Would you please remove that salamander from your hair?
Have you ever considered becoming a Mormon?
How long until we get there?
Does the motel on Neptune have a heart-shaped hot tub?
Who should we call if we're swallowed by a whale?
Am I embarrassing myself when I dance?
Are you sure that poem isn't a haiku?
Will you be angry if I finish first?
***
Wrote this in 2005. Today is not her birthday. Could have kept inventing questions but fourteen lines seemed a good place to stop, a kind of fake sonnet. Only the sixth question strikes me as especially Piscean. A certain type of Pisces - the dedicatee - would not consider these questions rhetorical. Some people, even some poets, don't believe lists can be poems. I've published a number of lists as poems without complaint, & many very good poems are thinly disguised lists if you examine them with that in mind.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Do you have any spare armor?
May I have a bite of your donut?
Why are forsythia yellow?
When are we coming back?
Where is the forest you can't see for the trees?
What is the secret of synchronous kisses?
Would you please remove that salamander from your hair?
Have you ever considered becoming a Mormon?
How long until we get there?
Does the motel on Neptune have a heart-shaped hot tub?
Who should we call if we're swallowed by a whale?
Am I embarrassing myself when I dance?
Are you sure that poem isn't a haiku?
Will you be angry if I finish first?
***
Wrote this in 2005. Today is not her birthday. Could have kept inventing questions but fourteen lines seemed a good place to stop, a kind of fake sonnet. Only the sixth question strikes me as especially Piscean. A certain type of Pisces - the dedicatee - would not consider these questions rhetorical. Some people, even some poets, don't believe lists can be poems. I've published a number of lists as poems without complaint, & many very good poems are thinly disguised lists if you examine them with that in mind.
