My choice of "umbrella" as a key element of my poem was due to a mention of Judith Hoffberg's zine, Umbrella, in one of the pieces in the little booklet for the mail art project that I was sent. Umbrellas are powerfully symbolic, for mes in my life. Since I strongly associate umbrellas, at least when lyrico-goofily into writing a POum, with one of the few happy boy/girl incidents in my life (when a woman I was semi-nuts about offered to share her umbrella with me on a rainy afternoon at Cal State Northridge, where we were both past-thirty students), I threw in a heart, first making it the divisor, later seeing it'd work better as the quotient. I needed something negative for the heart to multiply to get near to my conception (here) of an umbrella--i.e., as sheltering device. In other words, I needed something sheltered from. Graphic turmoil was the obvious image. In it I had a misspelling of "incoherence" and a correct spelling of "shadder," a portmanteau word I hope suggests shadows and shatter. There is another word somewhere in the mess, but I forget what it is.

I chose "with" as a near-synonym for "umbrella," at least in this context. I had trouble thinking of a remainder because, to me, "with" said all I needed to. I had to have a reaminder, though, so finished off the poem with "permanence." And I finish off off the poem: I don't intend to do anything more with it. (Note: strange as it may seem to some, I intended the poem to be accessible to everybody (who takes the time to absorb what it is doing arithmetically). I don't think many of my mathemaku are.)

What I find of greatest interest about this poem is that it is comprised almost entirely of images and devices I've often used before. The heart, a cliche for everyone, not just me, comes up a lot in my poems. The turmoil is everywhere in them, too, as are prepositions by themselves, even this particular one. And I wrote an omnilexical poem about my umbrella experience with the woman some years back. Moreover, the long division form is about my only form as a poet, now.

All this intrigues me because I'm one of those people who tend to think that one should be continually and consequentially new in one's art. As I've written elsewhere, it took me a long time to exploit my long division form because I felt that I could only use it two or three times at most. Any more use of it would mean I was just repeating myself (as I always thought Charles Schultz did after his first few years and wondered why he did--and admire Gary Larson and Bill Watterson for trying not to, while on the subject of popular comic strip artists).

I guess it's a question of whether you're taking a concept in a usefully new direction or not. When it's not a matter of merely, reasonably re-using words because they're the right words. In any case, right now, I using whatever occurs to me without worrying about such matters. That's a huge advantage of considering Paint Shop, or some equivalent, a practice room.

Boink. A few hours after writing the above, I was thinking about my poem and decided it wasn't accessible, after all. In fact, it wasn't logical--in the skewed way I want my mathemaku to be logical, at any rate. So I changed it to the version below, which I now think is my final version. I won't explain my changes except to say that whatever the heart represents, it would have to be larger than what an umbrella does, and that maps, for me, represent the understood or triumphed-over.