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Tall Ideas

are the open way of thinking
that use the patterns of the way
I motion with language

breathe like the way I amass
sometimes air
in my insides

carry heavy weight
like the having to good
ideas write

don’t like boy’s really
moving body of questions
that form tower of answers

eagerly want
to beat
the others

forge
toward
others

go
yonder

hang

impact
the wanting
words

jump from one
thought
to the next

kettle
like
fish

lavish like talking
people if they doctor
the words

master
language
openly

navigate
words toward
meaning

operate the machine
landing the thoughts amazing
that they don’t fall apart

pave
the wanting
road

question
wanting

really ask
more
questions

slant
with peeving
typing

tire to something
that rolls
with the road

use
people
to answer

vortex the void
and assembles
gathering words

water
thoughts
like rain

exit the door of cold
raying water
other is the way

yesses
the yonder

zoning the word and
uses the idea
to language everything

Copyright © 2019 by Adam Wolfond. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 1, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

More by Adam Wolfond

The Beauty of Autistic Knowing

The way of learning pace
was how I learned to string
words the way language paths
and makes meanings the way
jar of thinking was really

bathing in brine wanting to
for readers to understand
but the management of
language at ABA schools
was demanding speech and

because I couldn’t speak
I was going to the lines of
watchful therapists that tried
the same words over and
over again so I wasn’t

able to express myself
in the ways they thought
I should and that was awful
for me so I want the world
to know that autistic language does a bathing talking feeling

and seeing that immerses
everything and the bathing is
the beauty of autistic knowing.

Adam Wolfond

2022

In Way of Music Water Answers

Like water I am eager
Like water I am thinking
Like water I always move

Like water I am thinking time
open and following eager going
pathways and open going nowhere

I boat on the way water the way I want to talk

Adam Wolfond

2022

Roaming the Forest of Eager Talking

The eager clattering singing wastes my listening
and I am over

ready to run breathing the ways the
sticks invite my wanting

I want to think in feeling ways the talking thinks
in moving ways the sticks invite

thinking answering their questions
the eager clattering singing does

always interrupt the sailing play
the play is the questions the sailing

is the tears I know the tears
will overfill ready to become

a thinking and feeling I am
ready to become a loving man

Adam Wolfond

2022

Related Poems

In the Land of Words


In the land
of words,
I stand as still
as a tree,
and let the words
rain down on me.
Come, rain, bring
your knowledge and your
music.   Sing
while I grow green 
and full.
I'll stand as still 
as a tree,
and let your blessings
fall on me.

Eloise Greenfield

2004

Derrida/Coleman

Were it possible, I would be naked. Of the nude philosophy:
consider the globalization of the expensive american sound.

Should we worry? We should work. I believe you’re right.
I distrust the word “white.” It’s sanctified propaganda.

Repetition is my language of origin, the highest technology. Anyway
the body is only mine provisionally. For reasons that I’m not sure of,
I am convinced that before becoming music, music was only a word.

I prefer to destroy the composer, renew the concept.
Extraordinary limitation playing freedom.

Taylor Johnson

2019

Presto! How the Universe is Made

On your Mark, one first O/riginal Form; Get set, a second
angular Segment; Go—the next step, a Rule replacing
each straight side in the first by the second; if I take

a box and for each side of that box substitute a cone
or peak, to make a kind of star—then do again
what I did before: take the star-box

and where I find a straight-line replace it
with a peak, to make a starrier star, nesting the shape
even deeper in the figure, re-placing

peaks to make a Star-in-the-Box! Or, a Diamond-heart-
Star at every level (a shape self-similar); a shape
of extreme complication, in only a few—in five—

iterations, it already reads as texture and is rapidly
sinking as it plummets, repeating, into bonded
lock, where photons mediate, shunting between

heavy center, vibrant orbit. Or deeper, look. No,
look, a quantum leap: the burst box—the born star—is re-
emerging on the line, on the line or/and . . . . Repeat:

Stephanie Strickland

2019

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