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Refrigerator poem

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A company named Fridge Fun in Santa Rosa, California, makes magnetic poetry kits for refrigerator doors. One such kit includes 240 words taken from Shakespeare. One arranges the magnetic words to make one’s own poems. I had one of these kits on my refrigerator door in San Francisco, and a friend had written a 15-line poem on the door. When I moved, I couldn’t bring myself to disassemble the poem, so I transferred the magnetic words one by one to a cookie sheet to preserve the poem. I finally got around to typing the poem into the computer.

Refrigerator poem

All errors lost in this world
Hath always love as a stage.
Thus such human sorrow protests
Wicked men who dream
About created women

What torture shall plague it self unto
Brave riddance whence I am damned
For playing love’s rotten pomp
Discretion will own me nothing:
Trouble never toileth too much mercy

Pray thine rose dost kill bad art
‘Tis mad the night’s flesh became
Alas ambition breaks when a new light is made
Fit and true in me
My most strained heart is good for thee.

— James Michael Gregg, San Francisco, 2005

Just for fun, here are the very few words left over from the kit that were not used in this poem: Part, Circumstance, It, Was, The, At, Neither, Philosopher, Nor, Borrower, Lend, Comedy, An, Home.

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