Little Boxes
By the numbers there’s my driver’s license,
car registration, license plate, zip code,
various accounts, street address, birthdate
home, work, and cell phones, passport, credit cards
debit cards, PINs, social security
frequent fliers, internet passwords, stocks
checking, HMO, IRA, museums
library card, land and enneagram.
I know its a lot to remember, but
thank god i finally know who I am
~ Jim Woessner
The poem is something that Jim calls a ‘square poem’ - that is 10 lines of precisely 10 syllables each. It is part of a larger collection called ‘Little Boxes’ … a book that contains “a unique style of poetry in which each poem is a short story told in only 100 syllables.”
One hundred poems. Ten thousand syllables.
Loved it when it first came out. Still do and hope you do too.
It is of course a perfect example of something Oscar wrote over 130 years ago.
"Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life"
~ Oscar Wilde
What continues to fascinate me: 27 letters, that's all we have, and yet, with all of the libraries and magazines and other boxes, big and small, we still find unique combinations of those letters in our effort to connect.