Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Third-Hand Anecdote of a Poem of an Anecdote of a Third-Rate Movie

A fan of puzzle poems once read
A poem exactly opposite
The nature of its creator.
It was a bad but honest poem
By a good, dishonest woman.
It was, like so many bad poems,
Part memory, part confession,
Yearning to attain to wisdom.

It set a scene of the poet
Relaxing at somebody's farm
On a sleepy, hot afternoon,
Reevaluating her life,
And concluding it was wasted,
Then deciding she didn't care.
Defiance triggered memory
Of a movie seen in childhood

Which the poet then proceeded
To explain in useless detail
Lingering lovingly over,
The precise terminology,
The facts, and the actors' real names.
It was just a kid's movie aimed
At the pangs of adolescence
And the triumph of underdogs.

It seems that the crux of the film,
Involved lead actor Bill Murray
As the childlike adult-in-charge ,
Rallying the underdog kids
With a speech before the big game
That he was allowed to ad-lib
As an anti-rallying chant,
With mildly anarchic results:

"It just doesn't matter! It just
Doesn't matter! It just doesn't
Matter!" went the climactic cry.
Of course, this being Hollywood,
Even not caring for results
Only helped the underdogs win.
But down the decades, the poet
Became nostalgic for that scene.

She acknowledged its silliness 
But wrote that for her it meant
The truth: "It just doesn't matter!
It just doesn't matter! It just
Doesn't matter!" Then she returned
To the theme of life on the farm,
Trying to tie a lazy day
Into knots of philosophy.

Me, I suspect that she wanted
Relief from the constant burden
Of calling herself a failure.
Truth was that everything mattered
Very much, to her, after all.

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