Bicentenial

I love the first line, "Moving as a mind moves across a math problem," It's got good sound--those four repeated m's grab our attention. And it also suggests something else, that we're going into something both complicated and everyday. It's complicated b/c most of us struggle w/ math problems. And yet it's everyday, too, b/c a math captures the real world, math helps us understand the real world, physics and dimensions and distance. It just describes that real world in symbols and numbers. In many ways this poem is a math problem. It's told in seven sections w/ three stanzas for ea section. Nearly all of the stanzas have eight lines of similar if not exactly the same dimensions. For some reason, there are two stanzas w/ 9 lines and one with 7...

I also think the drug talk is important too. There is something trippy about the way this poem plays w/ time and space.