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I have a bad habit of leaving piles of poetry all over the apartment, reams and reams of papers torn out from the typewriter only to be trod upon or carried out the window by the spring breeze, where they often alight on non-poetic things like fence posts and car windshields.

Recently one of these sheets of verse wound up in the hands of the apartment caretaker, a slight but strong-hearted Tunisian woman who knocked on my door once she picked up the paper and recognized my signature typeface. "Young sir, I knew that you had troubles, but nothing like this," she said, holding the paper toward me with a look of concern and sorrow.

Upon recognizing the particular piece she held in her hand, I smiled and shook my head. I had, in fact, carefully selected, arranged and typed out the following verses. But as you're sure to see, this was no ordinary poem...

"?"

Who do you think you are
Who do i vote for
Who do i look like
Who do you love
Who does she think she is
Who done it
Who do you want to be

What could be better
What could happen to the target cells in an animal that lack receptors for local regulators
What could cause dizziness
What could happen in 2012
What could cause a missed period
What could cause a false positive pregnancy test
What could he be thinking
What could cause blood in stool
What could you buy with 700 billion

When will i die
When will the world end
When will i get married
When will we know who is president
When will i see you again
When will i be loved
When will twilight be on dvd

Where the wild things are
Where the hell is matt
Where the red fern grows
Where the heart is
Where the sidewalk ends
Where the buffalo roam
Where the light is
Where the truth lies
Where the streets have no name

Why do cats purr
Why do men have nipples
Why do dogs eat grass
Why do leaves change color
Why do men cheat
Why do we dream
Why do we yawn
Why do people smoke
Why do dogs eat poop
Why do fools fall in love

How to tie a tie
How to kiss
How to get pregnant
How to make money
How to lose weight
How to draw
How to make a website
How to cook a turkey
How to write a resume
How to lose friends and alienate people

Where is the love lyrics
Where is dubai
Where is chuck norris
Where is my mind
Where is the g spot
Where is waldo
Where is my polling place
Where is my stimulus check
Where is the love

- LW/Google, 2009

As you might have already guessed, the lines above are not the product of my teeming brain, but rather the questions and concerns of millions of people as typed into a Google search window. All I did was type in the first two words and wait until those questions popped up as part of the "auto-complete" or "auto-fill" function, which attempts to finish your question based on what countless people have already run searches for. What you see above is almost exactly what came up in the search fields when I compiled this last month, though I'm sure it would be slightly different now.

So the questions in this piece are not those of one man, but rather all men -- although the results are admittedly skewed toward English speakers with Internet access and a marked neurosis about pregnancy issues.

I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek about this, as usual, but I actually really do like this formula for generating short works of literary ephemera. I think it would be really fun to come up with a short video or animation where a different voice reads each line. It's like interviewing someone, except you're getting to their most secret concerns without even knowing who they are.

If nothing else, I hope the chorus of questions above serves as an antidote to the loneliness and secrecy that so often accompany an individual person's google search. As my dear friend Scott Frances said in response to this piece:

Thanks for your inspirational message. I really related to this poem, especially the following parts:
How to kiss
How to get pregnant
Where is the g spot

When I read your explanation, I was so happy to know that other people were also googling the above lines. It made me feel like I'm not alone in this world.

And that, my friends, is all a blogger/poet/search engine can really hope to achieve.