I see.
Don (the other guy in “Contact Don and Dave”) once pointed out all the hidden meaning in a poem by Geoff Parsons and it was pretty neat. I’m either too impatient, too literal, or too stupid to find most of it myself, most of the time, but I see some of it sometimes. I think I see more of it than the average reader, but perhaps not. If I do, then I guess the following advice will be helpful. Make it a little easier. Once change would be to give a clue other than “king” and “board”, such as “what moves will win a war” instead of “just how to win a war”. But boy, I almost never advocate making things easier!
I always like to provide a channel of advice - that is, a way for my audience to avoid going too far, but still make some progress in the direction I’m advising them to go. It fits with my general idea of underdose vs overdose - we all ought to know the symptoms of both, right? So I think that rather than simply adding more clues to your poetry, a better approach would be to put yourself outside of that context from which you wrote the poem. For example, when you referred to hearts, chess, and cricket, you were thinking of how to deal with boredom (I think). But to make the references available to the people (idiots?) like me, you have to imagine us in all our variety of circumstances - perhaps reading your poem while a sweetheart is preparing a meal, or while waiting for a loved one who was just bailed out of jail, or while relaxing before sleep (ie not having boredom on our minds - at all). When you can get out of your own context like that and see the myriad directions in which a search-for-neat-references could go, you’ll see just what could use more clues.
You have made today enjoyable for me. Thanks!
