So I'm doing this poetry reading thing on Sundays.  I've been going there just listening for the past couple months, trying to get a feel for what exactly poetry is...I never did well in those classes in high school, and I didn't exactly pursue it in college, either.

So why am I going?  The hostess is a friend of mine from college, and I had a crush on her then.  And she sent me an invite a couple months ago.

From what I've seen, a poem is a person's expression of experience or emotional state.

Anyway, while thinking about what I might write, I thought of what I do as a programmer, and what computers do at my bidding.  I've seen poems that took advantage of the written nature of the medium, where the implact of the poem can't be completely be felt without it being seen.  Take this one that showed up on bash.org, of all places:

<Axe> I
<Axe> do
<Axe> not
<Axe> know
<Axe> where
<Axe> family
<Axe> doctors
<Axe> acquired
<Axe> illegibly
<Axe> perplexing
<Axe> handwriting;
<Axe> nevertheless,
<Axe> extraordinary
<Axe> pharmaceutical
<Axe> intellectuality,
<Axe> counterbalancing
<Axe> indecipherability,
<Axe> transcendentalizes
<Axe> intercommunications'
<Axe> incomprehensibleness.

My thought for a poem was to illustrate a generic multithreaded program.  Each thread would have its own parallel poem in its own column, with visual interruptions for things like shared mutexes.  This would go on for several lines, with one thread perhaps giving other threads things to do, except that a race condition manifests, and one of the threads hits an ASSERT, stopping that column.  Another thread might then halt, waiting on a mutex or an event held by the ASSERTed thread, and then a few lines later, the remaining threads end with the line <break>

It couldn't be read aloud by a single person, and would be incomprehensible even if you had one person reading for each thread, unless you could rewind the performance and play it back several times.

Anyway...I'm not bringing that one tonight. (This post represents its first commission to "paper")  But I thought I'd share the idea.

Coding and typing
And coding and typing
And coding and typing
And music comes on
A little bit of eurodance
And the fingers go flying
S t D col COL M a p op-ANG i N T com-a
And on until the song's over.

Coding and typing
And coding and typing
And coding and typing
And music comes on
A bit of neo-swing
And the fingers go flying
CON-trol TAB-eff TWELVE-end SHIFT-home
And on until the song's over.

Coding and typing
And coding and typing
And coding and typing
And music comes on
A bit of Darude
And the fingers go fly-
Ah, damn.  I can't type THAT fast.