July 11, 2004

• "Bornagain"
  

  
  

  Poetry by Michael F. Nyiri

  
  

  May 01, 1999

  
  

  
  I awake,
  In my birthday suit,
  Naked to ambition, to creativity, to anticipation
  At once I feel a rush of emotions, and no receptacle into which to pour them.
  I am whole, I am resurgent
  What can I say today?

  
  

  The poetry has been AWOL for much too long.
  The words want to come, but they get caught in the breeding area,
  And seldom find the modicum of inspiration needed to exercise their birth.
  My birth into realization was a long time ago.
  The words used to spill from me at some sort of superhuman rate.
  The words were in my head, in my hand, in my pen, and on the page.

  
  

  There seems to be no filter.
  Thoughts, memories, lessons, fears,
  These are filled to bursting in my psyche, yet cannot be loosed in any reasonable manner
  To find their way to the page.
  Computers were going to help.
  So now five years on from the word processor and the computer, the poetry finds it’s babysteps.

  
  

  Forty-six.
  I don’t think I felt as anxious at forty-five, maybe that was the last birthday,
  And this is the first.
  The poetry used to have a clear path from the mind to the page through the hand.
  Now in the age of information one has to power up the computer.
  What was supposed to be labor saving and a boon to creativity has become an excuse which sits in the other room.

  
  

  The words are now subservient to the fonts.
  The meaning is less important than the presentation.
  The poetry exists.
  It just doesn’t come out and play that often.

  
  

  When first confronted with the word processor document screen I didn’t know when the pages ended.
  I spent a large amount of time trying to juxtapose the pen and paper to the computer.
  Now it seems simple to me.
  Even as this document finds itself typed up on the screen,
  The poetry is not inherent.
  The function is all-inclusive, blocking clear thought.
  Maybe poetry was never meant to be typed.
  Maybe that would be a new type of poetry.
  A poetry that is
  Bornagain

  
  

  Each day is but a byte of existence
  A partition on our drive of life
  Each feeling is but a conduit to eternity
  A lifelesson learned
  An answer to childhood musings.
  Trouble is, I felt more in control during my childhood,
  The childhood which ended at forty-five.
  It took a long time.

  
  

  Who am I writing to?
  You were supposed to read me throughout the years.
  Now, in my birthday suit I feel alone and naked.
  You haven’t appeared yet,
  much like the poetry seldom appears,
  And then the poetry is only memory on a computer disk,
  And not a tangible representation of artistic endeavor.

  
  

  I want to exercise this boiling cauldron of creativity.
  This is the age of information after all.
  But I only ramble, in hopes that a theme will emerge.
  It’s been forty-six years of false starts.
  Forty-six excuses hampering the creative muscle.
  Forty-six ways of spelling procrastination.
  I read the news and I am not surprised.
  I am jaded to Millennial Madness.
  I take longer showers in the morning,
  A symbolic womb from which I am reluctant to leave.
  In my brain, my processor, my universal firewire it all seems so clear,
  Bornagain.

  
  

  I want to reach out and touch you all.

  
  

  ....................................................

  
  

  © 1999 Michael F. Nyiri : NOTE: I had stopped writing poetry again after 1995, when I moved out of the house with Pat and into the house which I now share with Cancerboy. Being "free" of the rather depressing relationship with Pat was exhilarating. I bought a new car (a 1992 Geo Metro Convertible) and a new bigscreen (the 60", still in the living room) and in those heady days of the late nineties, I was making *lots* of money, so I sort of forgot the poetry for a while. I got my first "word processor", (an electric typewriter with a floppy drive and a screen) so I could begin the arduous task of "transcribing my poetry" in digital form which later became "ElectricPoetry".  I wrote three poems in 1997, about Alyssa, whom I met in Las Vegas. This is the first poem I had written since then, and I wrote "bornagain" on my birthday in 1999, after I had hooked my first computer to the internet, and began my cyber journey. The very first webpage I ever "designed" the bornagain HTML still exists where I "placed" it in 1999, which is rather interesting, I think. The link takes you to the original page, and it's rather interesting that it is just simple type on a white page. I hadn't "learned" HTML or webconstruction at that time. I simply used the editor, much as I use notepad today, as a word processor, which was the first "electronic" medium I used for typing. Which takes me back in memory through the typewriters, and back to the first, an old Underwood, black, from the forties, about 15 inches high, with round keys that took an awful lot of force to strike (and why I destroy keyboard after keyboard with my "forceful" style of typing.) I wonder if my sister has that typewriter, or if it just got thrown out. It would probably be worth an awful lot of money on ebay (the site I will "never" visit).                         

  
  

  Poetry from 1999 is accessible here on the ElectricPoetry site.                 

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