When Google and Doodle Converge: Aka Poet at Work
Yesterday I googled
“Drop off the face of the earth”
and worried the FBI could be watching
I wanted to pay up whatever was due
but couldn’t afford forever stamps
I learned that empyreal is a real word
that means the highest part of heaven
It speaks to the quantum reality
that emptiness and matter exist
at the same time
I was looking for a new poem
and found the unexpected
letters strewn like constellations
waiting for the dots to be connected
I bought up all the silk nightshirts
that I could find on Ebay
because Amazon is not a river
and everything new is made of polyester
I watched a Youtube fiddler
whose bow was like a saw
that cut a groove of music
as he strummed it back and forth
My cursor hand is a butterfly
spinning circle crops
hovering then landing
on the next new thought
Today I googled
plague or pandemic?
Bacteria or virus?
And the rules of Risk
I typed a poem’s line
and changed it three times
then printed out a page
to mark my best aim
to mix the ink of last and first
to merge synapses of right and left
to draw conclusions
and liberate free verse
back to the drawing board
where poets work
__________Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United
October 3rd, 2021 1:57 am
How lovely that someone is celebrating all the ways we can play (and work) online!
I chuckled about the FBI, remembering when I naively looked up porn sites for inspiration in writing a sex scene – and of course found them no help whatever, being visual rather than textual and also very unerotic to anyone not a violent misogynist … and then wondered if I had left a trail that could be very much misunderstood.
I love the butterfly cursor hand.
And, speaking of the dreaded polyester versus natural fibres, I recently bought bamboo sheets. A revelation; I love the the way they feel!
Your last verse, with its lovely word-play, sums up perfectly.
October 3rd, 2021 6:31 am
That’s something I always worried about when googling how exactly can you kill someone with a pencil, though I was making sure my autistic brother didn’t accidentally discover how (he is fascinated by pencils). I thought how would I explain this during a cross examination, it’s not what it looks Like? Fascinating piece by the way
October 3rd, 2021 11:15 am
There’s so much to relate to in your poem.
when i don’t feel like writing, i go to the web. youtube, wiki, anything that interest me at the moment.
i have yet to google my name. those pesky algorithms are watching.
October 3rd, 2021 11:41 am
I’m with you in every line. I guess I’m addicted, but my computer is my world — entertainment, information, community, family reunion, and endless fuel for my unending curiosity. You describe it so well!
October 3rd, 2021 12:38 pm
I love that fourth stanza. And a rewrite of only 3 times? Why…that’s amazing. Very good work here.
October 3rd, 2021 1:45 pm
I love a poem that becomes what it says. You are so good at doing this kind of magic with words. This is so much fun to read. And the nudge about the trail left by Google searches made me giggle. I always wonder if some government agency won’t look my way every time I’m doing research for a particularly violent scene or for poison.
October 3rd, 2021 2:54 pm
For a curious person, the world is overflowing with interesting chunks of knowledge and amusement. The internet brings us so much and yet threatens to take away even more.
October 4th, 2021 8:47 am
Each verse offers up a philosophical question – something to think about.
(Use Duck Duck Go instead of google for a bit of privacy from their algorithms)
Do you or anyone else have a great first line of a poem but the rest just doesn’t come together? From someone at a drawing board as well 😉
October 4th, 2021 10:55 am
Yes, Joel that happens to me. Just a great started line then nothing. I just save it and put it somewhere later. Sometimes that’s all that’s meant to be and I consider it a short poem. Sometimes something more comes eventually. Last lines are often the hardest for me.
October 5th, 2021 3:13 am
The title alone made me smile, because God knows the things I google. 🙂 I absolutely enjoyed reading your poem, Colleen. Wordplay, bit of humour and seriousness all put together…Accomplished!