MARKING THE EMPTY PLACE

The experiment in inventing rhyming poems from randomly found first lines has been joined by a few more people on my Facebook page.

There's nothing new about such a process. Innumerable visual and literary methods have long been used to release the mind from the effort of rationality, allowing spontaneous invention to flow - games like Exquisite Corpse or Consequences, finding images in clouds, stains, inkblots and so on. Of course this doesn't mean that such methods are magically going to produce masterworks (or even minor works) in any medium at all. But there's no doubt that something enjoyable, captivating and stimulating to the imagination happens when you give yourself permission to follow the rules of an apparently nonsensical game, such as this one.

In today's blind bookshelf-stroking, I pulled out "Numbers: The Universal Language". Page 47 gave me these starting words: Marking the empty place.

MARKING THE EMPTY PLACE
Oh now you're asking me to face
an ancestor I cannot trace
a secret tale I do not know
buried so deep so long ago....
Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear oh!
Don't make me go back to zero!
The empty place shelters a ghost
whose face ressembles me the most.
If she or he could speak they'd say
Please go! Oh please do go away,
there's nothing here for you to see,
only zero and infinity.