Waiting for the Last Gasp – Adam Overland

I’ve long said that I’m good for about one poem per year, but as the years have gone on it seems more like it’s one about every 18 months. You’d hope with a quantity so low that the quality would be high, but I don’t want to get your hopes up with this, my first poem of 2024 and possibly since 2022.

I’m not sure why I’ve slowed down, but I now have in my back pocket 29 poems that I’ve saved in a folder on my Google Drive entitled “Poetry by an Idiot, with Interludes,” which I hope to self-publish as a book someday to give to family and friends, and then I’d have some artistic friends do some visual art to go with a few of the poems.

These 29 poems are the 29 I’ve decided are worth letting people read. Then I’ve got maybe a dozen more that I put in a purgatory folder, where they will stay as a reminder of whatever I was thinking at the time, but which aren’t that good even relative to the other 29 (which aren’t great, but make me laugh). Then I’ve probably written several more over the years that I’ve junked afterwards. And so that likely adds up to around 46 poems, which works out to one per year of my life if I had been writing as a baby. Some of the poems, actually, probably seem like they were written by a baby, including more than one that I claim is among the 29 “good poems” that are worth publishing in a book. Two examples of poems I might have written when I was a baby but didn’t are: 

Lost Love
Where you go?
You were here
But not now
Where you go?

and

Soft Time
Sometime, friends give hard time.
Say, “you no good job, you poor, not funny.”
I go way sad to hamster name Larry.
Larry okay guy. He listen with big eyes and twitchy nose.
He give soft time; lend furry ear. Now, not so sad.

Larry.

Yesterday I had a stroke of self-loathing which led to a poem bemoaning my perpetual and tragic waste of time and energy in the circular pursuit of social and other media via the Internet. It goes like this:

At my fingertips
The knowledge of the entirety of human civilization is available on the Internet… 

And I check Google News for the 7th time today

Every field of knowledge, from philosophy to astrophysics, far flung planets in the infinite cosmos and the equally infinite worlds of consciousness

And I argue with my cousin on Facebook about Pizzagate 

Beethoven and Bach, Wu Tang and Wagner (with a V!), Pavarotti and Public Enemy, John—Lennon and Cash

And I check my bank account balance 
not for the first time today

The rise and fall of the Roman Empire, Newtonian physics, the Industrial Revolution, mankind’s small steps and giant leaps 

And I scroll until my finger aches 
through posts of puppies and women in too small bikinis 

Language and its origins, the telling of time, when fire first spoke to the imagination, the heat and mighty roar of story—the selfless and the sinful all at my fingertips

And I make a mental note that my Vaseline is running low

…like French doors (installation instructions available online) blown open by sudden winds, notions preconceived ready to shatter, entire vistas of human experience spill before me

And in my dreams I search for memes and become one