11 February 2004. I made the mathemaku below, which I haven't yet given a title, two days ago.

It was my second Paint Shop exercise. I started with the phrase, "just beyond the bridge," I'm not sure why. At first, it was the dividend. It seemed too slight for that office . . . or something; maybe I just couldn't think of any quantities I could multiply together to approximate it. In any case, I pushed it, and a bit of its background to the left to transform it into a divisor. Liking the way the hole its transferral made twinned the rough scrap it was on, I made the hole the back ground of the new dividend. It took me a long time to decide to use some preposition as the dividend--because nouns and adjectives, no matter what, seemed too uninterestingly to go with "just beyond the bridge," which is a location anything, practically, could be at. I chose "within," mainly because it was wide enough to fill a reasonably wide dividend shed.

Somewhat desperately, after not being able to think of a quotient, and perhaps influenced by the proximity of Valentine's day, I impulsively selected "love." The addition of the g to "within" followed to give the poem something slant, or interestingly wrong. As I've said, I love prepositions. I also love using one part of speech as another part of speech, in this case a preposition as a verb. I added parens to suggest "wing" and make "thing" more noticeable. The connotations of "wing" are, I think, clearly appropriate. I can't think how to justify "thing," but my intuition says it's good, too.

I stuck "shelter" in as simply a kind of "within," and left the remainder as a non-representational graphic. Again, I liked my sketch, but don't feel it is finished, by any means. But who knows?