Writing at the Old Stove

Writing at the Old Stove
Originally uploaded by tiff_hamburger.

Here I am scribbling away at The Old Stove, a charming Irish bar in Florence. When inside this bar, one forgets that one is in Italy, until of course you see the lunch menu and see all the panini offered on it.

I am fairly looped in this picture (one wouldn't know from the keen look of concentration on my face) but I am working on a poem.

You might think that because I was on my honeymoon, it was a swooning, romantic stanza, of the sort people in love are supposed to write. But instead I chose to play, by writing a poem based on words created through anagrams of the phrase "Firenze, Italia."

This resulted in a very strange poem that made very little sense. I told you I was looped, right?

Here is my drunken Florentine poem:
A tail in rain,
an ear at nite,
a net afire.
A fine fleet,
a finite zeal,
tear it and feel Zen.
Tile it, rent it, leer at it.
A fine rifle and a rife tale.

Totally senseless. And yet, glimmers of something in simple play. I particularly like "a net afire" and "a finite zeal." Who knows what, if anything, will come of this.

But I do know that we should play more, all of us. We should be allowed nonsense, allowed "free rein." When I am with Jason I am more playful, one of the reasons we complement each other so well.

So much of life is nonsense, and why shouldn't we enjoy the felicity of coincidence?

After all, an ear at nite could be the start of a rife tale...