I saw the sun rising. It was shining. I stopped

I saw the sun rising. It was shining. I stopped and saw the sun rising. Rising and shining. The sun was rising. So bright so shining.

I wanted to call my poem "The Shining", but it evoked the wrong connotations. I passed over "Rise and Shine". It sounded like a radio program. Finally I settled on "Nucleosynthesis

," as I knew that this would suggest notions of creativity, organization, ingenuity, and newness. These were the kinds of things that I wanted to convey within my new poem.

"Jack and Jill went on a straight path turning at Heathrow to get onto M25, I met them at 8:25. Why? Try." By post-modern deconstruction of nursery rhymes, I introduced banality to

the otherwise simple and gratifying art of killing a poem. In my father's time, poems were killed with hammers and hacksaws, but today, we use more refined techniques like

putting them in retirement homes and forgetting to visit. A poem is like that saying about the tree falling in the woods. If nobody ever reads it, does the poem actually exist?

I tried to deny their existence for a long time but when my 90-year-old mother showed up at my door yesterday with 3 of her friends from the nursing home & said they were moving in

to my bathroom I had to put my foot down. Not this time mother! "Norman!" she shrieked. I hated my mother. I loved my mother. I smiled at her, "You can stay in the basement."

I was tired of wiping soul crumbs off of her mandible after she "fed", but I needed someone to do the accounting around here. "Normy, Marion's soul was scrumdiddlyumpcious." Ugh.