Is intensity a frequency
Scaled to a pitch?
Has it got to do with density
Is it triggered by a switch?
Is the metaphor electrical,
So the force is but a buzz,
Maybe that’s too technical
And far from what it does.
Is it chemistry, that holds the key
To bundling up our nerves?
What’s the source of energy
That taps in to reserves?
. Things condense, and things increase,
. As things in waves, and springs release.

© Tim Grace, 18 December 2010

To the reader: Pulling apart an idea, stripping it of meaning, testing its logic; all the stuff of lexical unpacking. It’s what’s done to clarify understanding and guide debate. For the teenage mind, with its ever expanding glossary, the discovery of wordplay is an absorbing pass-time; as driven by dark matter … it has a pervasive attraction.

To the poet: Not a perfect sonnet, but snippets of it work. The word intensity has a nice syllabic percussion. The self-conscious question of ‘is it?’ (drawn from the letters of intensity) resounds. As a half-posed question ‘is it?’ deserves no answer and consequently receives a series of tentative possibilities. Interesting that the definitive ‘it’ is resolved by ‘things’ in the last couplet.

intensity