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this way – foto by Smith

A few folk read one of my haiku in last Sunday’s blog and thought it was a metaphor for me saying I felt like a trapped rat. I can see where they’re coming from.

Rat trapped in being
a rat in rat trap world
rat man maze amaze

Well, I have felt rat-ish and rat trapped in my rat past, but these days my rat thoughts are more along the lines of “if I’m the rat, you best step back, cuz I’m not the one gonna jump” (from 8 Ball Boogie).

I’d written a haiku about me holding our cat in my lap when she didn’t want to be held and had a good cat foto to go with it for my blog but felt two cat fotos would be too tacky so I looked through my fotos and the only thing that fit was the rat foto. But the cat-cat-rat didn’t flow right so I quickly wrote a rat haiku just to segue from cat to rat. No need, no truth, no metaphor – simple segue.

My poems aren’t always biographical. For example, in the letter tile poems below, I was stoned when I wrote “no pot”. Each poem has its own needs — sometimes truth serves, sometimes lies. In this case my sole constraint was the limited number of letter tiles to choose from – 3 of each letter with 3 extras each of A, E, I, L, O, R, S, T. The letters come from a children’s name bracelet kit – I got three out of a vending machine at a poetry reading for fifty cents each.

Making tile poems is rather like being an old Linotype setter – one must physically pick up and set each letter in place. Plus one composes poetry by seeing what words can be created from one’s ever diminishing lair of letters.




letter tile poems numbers 5 thru 7 – foto by Smith

One Response

  1. LOL.. I have a lot of truth in my poems but it isn’t always based on facts either.

    Hard to sometimes convince people of that.

    I like the last tile poem especially. Do you find it fun or frustrating to work with in the constraint of limited letters?

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