zumpoems

Why can it not last?
You’re like a rhyming haiku:
Too much, much too fast.

— Zumwalt (2011)

EDITORS NOTE: This particular short poem, received from Zumwalt last night via email, seems to have meaning at multiple levels, as one would expect. This quasi-haiku could be about one’s lifespan, the duration of a relationship, possibly the duration of a passionate encounter, or very possibly, due to Zumwalt’s interest in physics, about the relatively short life of a super-massive star, the brief duration of artificial atomic elements (like ununoctium which has a half life of less than a thousandth of a second) or the very brief duration of a subatomic particle (the Xi-sub-b referred to in “science delivers” lasts less than a billionth of a second.)

All that said, it seems the poem has some literal meaning, also. Zumwalt subscribed to an automated feed from a haiku blog. Soon Zumwalt was receiving one low quality haiku after another, each apparently written rather hastily. The final straw, it seems, was when Zumwalt received a rhyming haiku. This poem, along with Zumwalt “un-subscribing” to the automated hiaku feed, was the result.