word sieve

a useful tool I have discovered 

in managing worry/stress/anxiety 

is creating found poetry

when my thoughts are swirling I put them through a word sieve and see what comes out

I keep it simple (and small)

using cut up book covers as a foundation

I pretty it up with a painted border

and when I'm done

I have a little something to go on when someone says, "what do you think?"

it's not that I didn't know what I think,

it's that I didn't know how to say it

some interesting thoughts about found poetry:

“Happy poets who write found poetry go pawing through popular culture like sculptors on trash heaps. They hold and wave aloft usable artifacts and fragments: jingles and ad copy, menus and broadcasts — all objet trouvés, the literary equivalents of Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans and Duchamp’s bicycle. By entering a found text as a poem, the poet doubles its context. The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles. The poet adds, or at any rate increases, the element of delight. This is an urban, youthful, ironic, cruising kind of poetry. It serves up whole texts, or interrupted fragments of texts.” - Annie Dillard

"All writing is in fact cut ups. A collage of words read, heard, overhead. What else?" - William Burroughs

***

An Aside:

this duck walked right up to me in the park

he had such confidence

I had to wonder,

is it because he's tame?

or that he knows I am tame?