Poetry Forum

her mind is all boxes
arranged for the ticking
required for order;
fitting into the order
of ticking required for
her minds boxes.

some boxes are old
and tickless, some
are new and ticked,
but in all; ticks
are required for order.

for order requires ticks
in all boxes; for ticks mean
order in a mind of boxes.
I am a box as you are
a box to be ticked

so order can be ticked
as a box. Until boxes
can't be ticked like the
box he was not, and the boxes
pile up; unticked

like losing Tetris.

Hello Nar, Well this ticked all the right boxes for me, and a new way of looking at sanity for me. Just one nit if I may; at L18 would "as a box" not be better "as a series of boxes"? Enjoyed. Thanks for sharing. Lionheart.
P.S. - ever thought of reading some poetry, instead of playing Tetris?

This is great. Except tetris? Do the boxes disappear if you get it right? I wish. For me it's more like Jenga.

Really enjoyed this,

Nicky B.

for order requires ticks
in all boxes; for ticks mean
order in a mind of boxes.

You're wrong there. Order requires that the correct boxes are ticked. If all boxes were ticked then chaos would ensue. What 's required is a mechanism to indicate the absence of a tick. That would be in order. Consider yourself ticked off.

Disagree Ray.

Life is chaos, chaos is the norm, a desperate quest to tick all boxes.

Only once all are ticked will order be restored.

Nicky B.

Dear Nicky B - not B for Box, by any chance? Don't be ridiculous. If chaos is the norm, then order cannot be restored for it never existed in the first place. Consider your self ticked off.

sorry do you mind if i pounce in on this - i'm a complete chaos nerd and i enjoy chatting about it at any given moment which is unfortunate for most.
chaos is one of three types of pattern that exist in the universe, it is not necessarily the norm, and chaos is a commonly misunderstood since it is actually a highly "ordered" phenomenon (however ascertaining that order is impossible due to the problem of unknown initial conditions), chaos has three requirements (1. it must be sensitive to initial conditions; 2. it must be topologically mixing; and 3. its periodic orbits must be dense.)

because of the concept known as entropy (the tendency from order to disorder) life has had to find a way to ensure its survival i.e. asexual production is in a sense doomed in the long term due to entropy, (since it can not mix its DNA in order to eliminate undesirable mutations) life needed to find another way to avoid this problem - life (dna) is order if you like, it's all around us. dna is by far the most superior "computer" that ever existed and we're still baffled by it in many ways. there are many other ordered patterns that are interesting to observe such as the Fibonacci sequence which can be found in many species of plant. i wrote a poem about that quite recently although it wasn't very good.

Hi Nar,

The concept of the poem again evokes a lot of discussion. I'm not a big thinker. You know I'm not good at anagrams, this is like a brain teaser to me. It turns out to be philosophical in my old box. The idea I see is:

mind->boxes->ticked->order. How about the tickless old boxes? Are they in order?

It reminds me of the book, I-Ching also named the Book of Change.

Very much impressed.

Lake

Jesus Christ! Can't a man indulge in a bit of harmless banter without somebody throwing in Fibo-fuckin'- nacci!I hate that bastard.I'll get my (rain)coat.

This was a fun read. I can't quite grasp the meaning behind it. Most poems like this are shorter and easy to memorise for showing off. I'd like to read a memorisable version.
Semi colons don't work for me.
This is original and clever, good work.

Ray: you wrote:

If chaos is the norm, then order cannot be restored for it never existed in the first place”.

So I might as well give up my boxes and ticking then? A life’s work strewn to one side by one sentence. Bugger.

Raincoat: I was using chaos in its commonest derivative form, and besides I’m more of a complexity bod myself.

Nar: Sorry, have totally hijacked your thread, will probably discover you’re talking about something completely different, but still think your poem is fabulous.

[quote="vesuvius"
Semi colons don't work for me.


I don't wanna be around when you erupt.

Nicky B wrote:Ray: you wrote:

If chaos is the norm, then order cannot be restored for it never existed in the first place”.

So I might as well give up my boxes and ticking then? A life’s work strewn to one side by one sentence. Bugger.

Just don't try to tick all the boxes. If everyone ticked all the boxes we'd soon run out.

Nicky B wrote: Raincoat: I was using chaos in its commonest derivative form, and besides I’m more of a complexity bod myself.

in modern science chaos as in patterns sensitive to initial conditions is the commonest term.

Nicky B wrote:Disagree Ray.

Life is chaos, chaos is the norm, a desperate quest to tick all boxes. Nicky B.

Completely disagree Nicky, life is order, the important question to ask is how and why did that order come to exist? Many dynamical systems have shown that they have short term predictability (Volterra's analysis is an example) but the problem is when we apply that to chaotic systems (for example the weather), the problem of unknown initial conditions which makes our differential equations useless. The only way around it is to construct a new way of analyzing the problem if that is even possible. But there is order there, for example in chaotic systems the attractor is order - for example if we throw a ball into the sea, it will land on the surface, the surface is the attractor but how it got there we don't know and can't predict. Many systems have an attractor, it is even speculated that they could have more than one. There is order but we are still a long why from finding out how we can ascertain what it is or even if that's possible.

Neil's poem. I understood this as a personal outlook to life, a paradox, someone caught by their own mind, with two different outlooks rather than a generic statement about life, order and chaos. sorry neil for the hijack. I wasn't sure about the semicolon in S2. besides the content, which has brought on considerable debate i thought this had great rhythm. i thought it got going from S2.

This is starting to hurt my head now.

Ray and Raincoat, consider yourselves put in a box, and neatly ticked.

Phew.

p.s. in modern science that might be the definition of chaos, but aren't we on a potery forum? Or did I get lost again. Now get back in that box. *grin*

"for example if we throw a ball into the sea, it will land on the surface, the surface is the attractor but how it got there we don't know and can't predict".

What?

ray miller wrote:"for example if we throw a ball into the sea, it will land on the surface, the surface is the attractor but how it got there we don't know and can't predict".

What?

attractors, they're pretty cool and look like this:



the ones found in chaotic systems are known as a strange attractors, a famous one is the lorenz attractor or the butterfly, that's the one above.

so with the ball over the sea case, the attractor is the surface of the sea, a point in space which the system is attracted to, characterising its behaviour.

i'd recommend this book, the author explains everything about them with examples:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Does-God-Play-D ... 0140256024

Chaos and order are one. If that's simple or confusing. Back to your poem, Nar.

^_^

Interesting debate

The boxes I was referring to are more like a to-do list. I find that some people use this type of thing to bring order to their lives. This can be a day-to-day activity or a life paradigm.

In some cases, the ticking of the box becomes more important that the completion of the task itself.

As an example: I know someone who finds it more important to tick "the dishes are washed" box than it is to actually have clean dishes; so they half-wash the dishes just to tick the "dishes" box (then I have to wash them properly afterwards).

In some cases the boxes do represent order, but in some cases they represent a slant towards OCD-style behaviours that could be seen as chaotic.

When boxes become untickable, such a mind may indeed become very chaotic, as in the case of the person I was writing about here.

Cheers for all the comments. I'm back to re-read the debate again.

- Neil.

her mind is all boxes
arranged for the ticking
required for order;
fitting into the order
of ticking required for ---maybe 'of ticking, meet the requirement for her mind's boxes.'
her minds boxes.

some boxes are old
and tickless, some
are new and ticked,
but in all; ticks
are required for order.

for order requires ticks
in all boxes; for ticks mean
order in a mind of boxes.
I am a box as you are
a box to be ticked

so order can be ticked
as a box. Until boxes
can't be ticked like the
box he was not, and the boxes
pile up; unticked

like losing Tetris
Maybe 'because the tickless box
was the requirement of chaos.'

Okay, Mr Ticks-a-lot...I like the way you embraced the woman psyche, I do but...it's usually the one that doesn't tick the boxes that unfortunately gets a claw on that something that is more than boxes so the last line put a dampener on it for me. Rubix cube maybe, jenga maybe...but Tetris didn't work. Other than that I love the repetition, definitely made me smile and made it interesting. Nice work

Wish it was his and not her mind; ah there. Lovely and loud in a controlled and ordered sort of way. Newish and fresh. loved this

I am trying to get my head (badly) round the time frame of the piece. As an experiment I took the female out of it (men are just as bad) and started it in the past tense, comes out something like -

their mind is(was) all boxes
arranged for the ticking
required for order;
fitting into the order
of ticking required for
their minds boxes.

some boxes were old
and tickless, some
new and ticked,
but in all; ticks
are required for order. (could also be "were")

for order requires(required) ticks
in all boxes; for ticks mean(t)
order in a mind of boxes. (I would break it here...)
I am a box as you are
a box to be ticked (...and lose this break)

so order can be ticked
as a box. Until boxes
can't be ticked like the
box I was not, and the boxes
pile up; unticked

like losing Tetris.

I also agree that maybe this ending is weak although, having been a Tetris addict, I see the allusion.

Even though I suggested a bit of hacking I like this.

Steve

Enjoyed this a lot, nar (and the discussion about chaos). Who could possibly object to Fibonacci? Used him myself in a poem a few weeks ago...

anyway, I think the only bit that's a bit clumsy is:

Until boxes
can't be ticked like the
box he was not,

ending on 'the' isn't a great line ending, and the sense is a bit convoluted. But I got it was someone a bit OCD about having everything sorted and under control, and how they'd crack a bit if that system failed.

Ros