Poetry | Fred Aiken Writing

October 23, 2023

numb numbers painted

paint by numbers,
then forget where the numbers go,
and start painting wildly,
or not at all,
maybe call it abstract,
thoughtful, pensive, or some other such
cerebral title to make it seem
like it was all intentional,
then walk away,
maybe sell it, maybe don’t,
but never think about that one piece of artwork
you have hanging or laying away
some far off place,
in the back of the closet,
or up front in some schmuck’s living room,
no matter where the painting hangs,
it can’t seem to count,
since the numbers fled away

October 22, 2023

work from home

every time i go on vacation,
i reset all my passwords,
just in case i forgot to log out of my email
on my work computer,
but then i realize that i work from home,
and because i’m on vacation
i stop doing any higher level thinking
to the point where i stop remembering passwords,
which leads to me spending at least
one or two
days on hold with my email provider,
trying to recover a forgotten password
so i can see if my penpal wrote back to me

October 21, 2023

spell-check//one check

my english teacher was right,
and i rely too heavily on spellcheck,
so know every third word,
i misspell,
sometimes by accident,
though sometimes just for fun,
and i let the computer’s spellcheck do the heavy lifting,
since i can’t be bothered,

and i guess when the world has ended,
computers and electricity are no more,
then i might sit down and learn to spell
each word correctly,
though i’m not quite sure what for