Today I have two poems – not because I am boastful or greedy – they arrived in quick succession on the same page, so it felt wrong to separate them. They also didn’t have names until I realised that they were about words and ideas – how they are formed and what we do with them in a linear time universe.
Words
Carbon shaped over sequested carbon
Adding to other ideas already in stasis
Holding imprecise symbolic meaning
To be hung on a wall,
Hidden in a drawer,
Or thrown away with the other detritus
of a life barely half-lived.
Created as digitised ink would not alter their fate
Even the bits and bytes degrade
And crumble.
Falling into an ever smaller world of
powdered sandstone and forgotten love.
Ideas
The best I can hope for is a fired neuron
A temporary reaction
In your imagination
That will quickly dissipate
Along with all the fragments of
Ideas only ever half developed –
The symbols I fought to embed
And that you never saw.
Angele Toomey Poetry 