There! I've paused and reflected. OK, what have we just learned? Nothing. No: we have actually learned that nothing can be learned from just pausing and reflecting.
This brings me to the subject of List Poems. List Poems are poems that are as easy as pausing and reflecting, provided you take the trouble to learn how to write them. We are about to take that trouble.
To write a List Poem you first need a List. Popular Lists to Use, Include: or Opus 99, Bastards to Line Up Against the Wall, Etc., & creatures that God should have recalled, cigarette brands, foreign lands, electronic devices, foods healthier than white rices, New Age jargon, dime-store bargains, people you've seen in People Magazine, skin diseases, genital diseases, gastro-intestinal diseases, cheeses, animals at the zoo, things on your list of things "to do", things you beat, cuts of meat, things that piss you off, guys with names like Nabakov, fictional places, imaginary races, Biblical names and phrases, musicals, novels, and playses, Papal Encyclicals, Democrats, rock stars, Republicans, words that rhyme with "rats", old shows on TV, Friends of Noam Chomsky, discredited ideologies, famous writers and/or their tomes, popular lists used to write pomes, and various kinds of pomes you can do, to name but a few.
To illustrate I will use my Christmas Wish List. This is a good choice because my actual Christmas list has only two entries, namely a place to live, and hot sex. Thus we are naturally led to the next step in writing a List Poem, which is stuffing it. We must pad the List with extra items which may or may not belong (but nobody really cares!) Ask yourself: "do I want this thing to rhyme? alliterate? scan? or do I want it to make sense?" If you have answered as I would you are ready to pad your creation. The trick is to make stuff up.
Finally rearrange the List so that it sounds better.
Now let's see where these steps can lead us.
My Christmas Wish List
Dear Santa - it would surely be more than enough
if you'd only bring me just some of this stuff:
A hygiene center on every block.
A real pillow, please, instead of a rock.
More Sidrans & Seligs to write poems about,
World Peace, an adequate cure for the gout.
More government cheese, less government slease,
less rain, less un-asked-for "feeling of pain".
A mayor who listens to my friends and me
& not just to people who wave mon-ey.
A bed and a roof above my head
(and a source of bread, I shouldn't dread).
A years supply of tolerable beer,
hot sex with someone I like to be near.
For at least one month not to hear anyone say
that the homeless should all just go away.
And while I'm at it Santa, for just one day,
having to hear "Jesus was homeless, too"
is another thing without which I could do
thank you.
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