The Liminal Man

Writings of a man born between worlds

Bridgework

December 14, 2022

Words are the bricks and mortar of the mind;
pictures alone bear insufficient weight.
“Message” demands a bridge more strongly lined,
passing from brain to brain our human freight.
Wagons of thought traverse these worded roads,
linking through space and time our separate heads,
making from widely spread synaptic nodes
a single mental net of verbal threads.
Mathematics traced our footsteps to the moon,
but Johnson didn’t calculate alone.
The brains that steered the astronaut platoon
amongst them counted Archimedes’ own.
Since words convey between us all we know,
how great that art that shapes them as they go.

Notes:

This is an expanded version of a tweet-length poem I wrote to prove some kind of point in a Twitter discussion and then posted on Facebook. I’ve forgotten the original context, and having nuked my Twitter account last May, I can’t check. I’m sure I won the argument, though, since that’s how Twitter works. (TLM, Dec. 14, 2022)

The first iamb in each of the first seven lines has been replaced with a trochee. The final seven lines are normal iambic pentameter.