On Insane Conversations

Sometimes, all you can do is wait.  Wait for lunch to come so you can set it up for the
read through.  Wait for the call to come so you can transfer it to right line.  Wait for the
call to end so the writers can go back to breaking the episode.  Wait for the notes to
come in so you can make the necessary changes and publish the next draft.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

At times like this, I think of Kenneth Koch's poem "The Boiling Water."  It begins:

A serious moment for the water is when it boils
And though one usually regards it merely as a convenience
To have the boiling water available for bath or table
Occasionally there is someone around who understands
The importance of this moment for the water -- maybe a saint,
Maybe a poet, maybe a crazy man, or just someone temporarily disturbed
With his mind "floating," in a sense, away from his deepest
Personal concerns to more "unreal" things.  A lot of poetry
Can come from perceptions of this kind, as well as a lot of insane
   conversations.
Intense people can sometimes get stuck on topics like these
And keep you far into the night with them.  Still, it is true
That the water has just started to boil.  How important
For the water!  And now I see that the three is waving in the wind
(I assume it is the wind) -- at least, its branches are.  In order to see
Hidden meanings, one may have to ignore
The most exciting ones, those that are most directly appealing
And yet it is only these appealing ones that, often, one can trust
To makes one's art solid and true, just as it is sexual attraction
One has to trust, often, in love.  So the boiling water's seriousness
Is likely to go unobserved until the exact strange moment
(And what a temptation it is to end the poem here
With some secret thrust) when it involuntarily comes into the mind
And then one can write of it.  A serious moment for this poem will be
   when it ends,
It will be like the water's boiling, that for which we've waited
Without trying to think of it too much, since "a watched pot never boils,"
And a poem with its ending figured out is difficult to write.

That is not, rest assured, the end of the poem. Like water about to boil, what seems
to be the end turns out to be the start of something else.