Swings between two poles

Instructions, exactly

Take this medicine
on an empty stomach
preferably half to one hour
before breakfast. Take this

medicine with a full glass
of water. Take this medication
at least four hours before
taking antacids, iron

or vitamins
or minerals
or supplements.
Take or use this medicine

exactly as directed. Do not
skip doses or discontinue
unless directed by your
doctor. Take this

medicine exactly
as directed.
Do not skip
doses.

- Drew Myron

This is a found poem. A whole text, lifted from my medicine bottle and reformed — with line breaks providing places to pause — into art.

Some days material is at every turn: in newspapers, dictionaries, speeches, textbooks, manuals. Find poetry in the everyday, I often say.

With this avalanche of words, I usually lift and rearrange (a collage poem is born!), or sometimes I simply erase, but on rare days a poem is whole-cloth and sitting on my bathroom sink.

The found poem, according to the Academy of American Poets, shares traits with Pop Art, such as Andy Warhol's soup cans. Poetry, like art, is the invention of reinvention. In Mornings Like This, a collection of found poems, Annie Dillard says that turning a text into a poem doubles that poem's context. The original meaning remains intact, she writes, but now it swings between two poles.

Swings between two poles.

Yes, poetry holds that sort of magic — the mysterious ability to say one thing while reaching for another.