Processes
by Bill Yarrow
How to Boil Water
Get a pot.
Fill it with water.
Place it on the stove.
Turn on the flame.
When tiny bubbles appear and grow wild
Voilà!
It is done.
How to Cook an Egg
Read my poem “How to Boil Water.”
Drop an egg in it.
How to Eat
Press your food
into the hole
just below
your nose.
How to Think
Pick one thing
one thing you've been told
Pick this one thing you've been told
and pick
and pick
and keep picking at it
until the scab of unknowing
falls off.
How to Love
Sweep into one corner
all your ego.
Set a match to it.
How to Die
Watch those who live in your neighborhood.
Watch them closely.
Copy what they cease to do.
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Author's Note
Many, many years ago, I taught students how to write "process" papers at LaGuardia Community College. This poem came out of the misery and frustration of grading those papers.
"How to Love" as a separate poem appeared in Ramshackle Review 2.
Thank you, Mark Reep!
The poem appears in Pointed Sentences (BlazeVOX, 2012).
Bill, I really like this. I was laughing through it, but it left me quite sad.
!!! Well, here's one old school teacher who almost died of laughter reading this! Fave.
Nice piece, Bill. Good work.
How To Think is my favorite, but all of them have their zen moments. And Kari kind of nailed it. Still I absolutely love the level of creativity in your work. Good stuff.
I love this. Especially the "How to Love"; Everything seems so simple in writing...yet many of these are difficult in life.
Wonderful poem. Love the second stanza.
Loved this Bill. Such simple processes, and yet, in the way of the world, simple things morph into what seems difficult. Loved, loved, How To Love. *
Absolutely amazing piece here. Every word works. Every line hits home with the reader. Nice.
Oh Bill I LOVE this. (I, too, taught the "how-to" in my English comp courses at a two year college, years ago.) Just perfect.
Great stuff, Bill! I love the way the poems become more serious. I have missed reading your work - (I have been away for awhile from fictionaut).
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This is brilliant. The transformation from boiling water to dying so perfectly fluid. How to think, how to love - it's philosophy in a nutshell.
really strong- but simple. straightforward. good stuff!