Poem Photos

     There were Greek philosophers who surmised the world was made from mud, or fire, or a combination of elements, or even numbers or some underlying logos. These were all attempts to condense the totality of human experience into a convenient granule that explains it all. It's what modern Physics is trying to do. But as a poet none of this really concerns me as much as the ways in which we attempt to explain the experience we share on an everyday basis. For me this experience is primarily processed in words. I see words maybe in a different way than others. Maybe that isn't true, maybe I just pay more attention. For a brief period last summer I saw a few different examples of how words seemed to leap out of a container that was created to contain them. In my estimation these were words that existed outside of the context in which they were bound. So I pulled the words out and combined them with other words to create Poem Photos. It's all a long, long-winded way of saying words are all around us and often used with unintended consequences, or at least they evoke responses that were not intended by their creator. Here are some...

The photo was sort of hard to get at the angle, but the reader might be curious to know this picture was taken in the summer of 2010 and this sign still sits there. I wonder if anyone sees it the way I do. Want to see another one?

That one didn't blow up so well, but you get the idea. Even a can of asparagus says things to us. Here's the third of four.

The place where I live was recently found to be the ninth most dangerous city in America. Money Magazine used to find us the worst city in America on a yearly basis, which places any sort of promotional campaign the Chamber of Commerce concocts in a suspicious light. Certainly gaffs like this aren't helping, but they do provide for some unintended laughter at the expense of the already downtrodden. 

The fourth Poem Photo isn't done yet. It involves a generic bag you get at many local stored that simply says "Thank you" on it. The delay in the Poem Photo is largely that I need to combine the bag with a photo a curvaceous woman's ass and I'm not about to put out a casting call for that. 

Thank you for coming by and looking at Poem Photos by Thomas L. Vaultonburg.