Critics, if I had them, would say
I should use fewer words
and say more.
Yes.
My greatest critic is my cat.
I don’t have a cat.
But if I did she would approve
when I scratched her belly.
A poem is like Schrödinger’s cat:
Sitting on paper
both dead and alive
until a reader decides which.
Erwin Schrödinger wrote a poem
about his cat. Like all poems,
it was a thought experiment,
meandering a bit like this poem,
but in the guise of a science paper
dealing with quantum superpositioning.
It was not received quite as he intended,
as with any successful poem.
He wrote in free verse
but chose not to show off,
resisting German rhymes
for “quantum superpositioning.”
What he meant as an absurdity (a)
folds on itself into something
in some deep sense true (isdst),
leaving a remainder of one stanza line.
The formula reduces to a2 = isdst,
which might be the solution to all poetry.
The critics missed that trick
and should be criticized for that.
