About the Poems - ZS
About the Poems
by Zachary Schomburg Telephones II and III These are the last poems entered into the mix in my first manuscript, The Man Suit, yet unpublished. Telephones 1 is the longest poem I’ve ever written. There are telephones everywhere in it doing all kinds of crazy things. I won’t talk about Telephones 1 here though, though inside I’m dying, bursting. Telephones 2 and 3 are made up of the things that couldn’t fit in 1—they are the shavings collected, the hair on the floor that I swept up and made a nice little wig out of. In my head these are old telephones—rotary style. The ringing here is an actual ringing, like of an inner bell. I hope these poems come off a little creepy. This is a Night of Evenly Spaced-Out Escalators This poem makes me anxious/claustrophobic. I thought of it in an airport when I thought I saw a guy that could be a werewolf. I think werewolves are clean-cut during the day, and tiny. They are timid and always worried about being werewolves. The airport thing might explain the escalators, but from there, things get out of hand. The Mercury Topaz thing cracks me up. I think Tony Tost used to drive a white one, but I can’t be sure. The Nothing and the Inappropriate Cartwheel I wanted to write a whole bunch of poems about the “Thing.” It would be this undefined main character thing. It would have no shape. It would not really be a person but it would be put in person-like situations. This is the one poem I wrote and then I got tired of the whole idea—but now that I write this out, I’m getting a bit of a rise out of it again. Maybe there’ll be more. Far From Marlene The first line of this poem was written last summer, over a year before the rest of the poem. I have this MS Word page with a tub-load of phrases, half-poems, epic ideas, small ideas. I found it during a painful writer’s block and it turned into a whole poem rather quickly and I felt pretty resourceful about it. Sleeping came easy that night. I’ve never known a Marlene, but I thought it sounded good with “Far.”