My psychic antenna doesn’t always pick up on National Poetry Month when April rolls around. Early April is more like the time that we in New England are kept busy searching the weather reports for any viable sign of real springtime. Typical of this seasonal limbo is my current disinclination to put pen to paper even though, as Bobby Dylan once put it, “I have a head full of ideas that are driving me insane.”

I did spend some quality procrastination time this week going over old notes and clippings and perusing photos I took long ago with my first camera, a brown-and-cream colored instamatic that used 126 cartridge film (see above). I also found a torn-out notebook page that I knew would come in handy some day. Back in the late 90s, while living in Cambridge, Mass. the city put up several magnetic poetry boards in Central Square. You know the kind, with hundreds of individual little magnets made up of one word each. I was quite enamored at the beguiling and beautiful poetic snippets that arose from scrambled word combinations and wrote down my favorites. So I’m marking NPM with a celebration of the inner poet that apparently resides in us all. I also got into the spirit yesterday by going to a site that tells you how to make your own magnetic poetry kit. I printed out a page of random words, closed my eyes, and put a pencil down on several words then fashioned them into a half-haiku that uncannily seemed to be saying something to me that I ordinarily wouldn’t have found a voice for (see the header above). I’m sure many of the people that came up with these little gems below felt the same way at the time.

Start to end winter inside; you are born in our desire

Elaborate green garden remember

Some swim like rain forest picture

Listen: all yesterday my fever and fire like moose did sail in liquid star

Every marble which must always shine
Lie like a cat this game this game may die
By sky look at I am joy

Magic perfume went blindly into the night

A girl once flew to get together and out

For the castle the moon, a bare angel
Soft like no boy of sweet summer

Forgive live as magic it may wake up or go

Love grow fast and free girl

Did owl have feline heart?
Round and wet blue, song-fed dinosaur
Stop once in peace

Dad that cried do not get sad
Slowly happy together grow
We were green and are

My bath may smoke up and have sun on the breeze

One silly day you were bleeding and went into my box

Born on yellow farm, summer night glow
Homeless child of night cried “friend!”

Yesterday went away like a slow song of woman’s desire
Joy ran from a friend, she went round slowly
A blue sky whispering yes
Smart rain round my night, moon turn out poison