poemranker ::Time Thief by Dovina

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Free verse № 141502

Time Thief

by Dovina

Member since 2004 · Posted 28 Mar 2006 · 11 comments

Procrastination steals no time, not like wives’ tales say. Punctuality’s to blame. Early arrival wastes time waiting. Late comers get more sleep, stay up later, watch cartoons, draw defecations, defacing some Islamic patriarch. If time is short, slow down; if plentiful, speed. In slowness, few mistakes. In speed, abundant blunders. Fixing errors kills your time. People who’ve come as far as I don’t slow down so much to rest as to speed to where they’re going, having learned along the way, mistakes are the thieves of time.

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mean 6.29 weighted 5.35 rank 3422 views 277 View voting details →

7 votes so far. Yours would make 8.7 votes so far

11 comments

[6] matt door 28-Mar-06/7:42 PM Reply
Parts of this are fairly good - other parts - really suck quite frankly. Keep posting, because you have talent, this piece
just lacks it for the most part. Sorry.
[n/a] Dovina › matt door 28-Mar-06/7:43 PM Reply
Are you one of those guys who move fast and make lots of mistakes?
[8] ecargo 29-Mar-06/7:13 AM Reply
Good idea, but it's a little dull--Poor Richard's without the wit. The Danish cartoon reference is disconnected and a little silly.
[8] ecargo › ecargo 30-Mar-06/10:00 AM Reply
I had to up my vote because I kept thinking about this last night and that says, to me, that something's working well. It is a clever idea in an aphorism kind of way--like I said, it reminds me of Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac. http://pages.prodigy.net/jmiller.cb/prs10.html

The Danish cartoons (http://www.zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/jyllands-posten_cartoons/ ) still don't seem to belong in there, IMO.
[n/a] Dovina › ecargo 30-Mar-06/11:08 AM Reply
The cartoon diversion is no more than a fun way to show how much more we can do if we stop hurrying. You’re right, it doesn’t belong there.

I was inspired to write this admittedly didactic aphorism to counter slogans like Poor Richard’s, “Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure.” It seems to me that most such proverbs are too simplistic to be of much value. Thanks for raising your vote and for the comments.
[8] ALChemy 30-Mar-06/12:24 PM Reply
Your a southern girl so procrastination is in your blood. I have no excuse for why I procrastinate. If only I were a pothead.
[n/a] Dovina › ALChemy 30-Mar-06/12:27 PM Reply
If you mean Southern California, then southern I am. And coffee is in my blood.
[8] ALChemy › Dovina 30-Mar-06/1:08 PM Reply
You're not from Tennesee?
[n/a] Dovina › ALChemy 30-Mar-06/1:51 PM Reply
Read "Divorcing Tennessee" to find out what it was like moving from there to California. I have another poem about that traumatic time ready to post, but must wait the obligatory five hours.
[6] amanda_dcosta 30-Mar-06/12:55 PM Reply
I think I liked your 'fishy' poem better. This seems a bit disconnected on the whole and I wasn't really impressed compared to quite a few writes of yours. Probably you aught ot edit it , although I don't know exactly how. I'm still not clear on what you had in mind while writing this.
[8] zodiac 30-Mar-06/1:48 PM Reply
The weird half-rhymes in the first stanza are good. The repetition of "time" at the ends of lines is not. Nor is the digression about Islamic cartoonists. The last stanza's tidy, didactic, silly, Benjamin Franklinesque, and unnecessary if you'd done your job in the first four stanzas.