Love Poem

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Bourbon Poem By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

A visual poem about bourbon by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

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Greenwood Cemetery Rockford, Illinois

As a poet I'm the first person to admit words can be a damn troublesome nuisance. A lot of times they refuse to do what you want them to do. And sometimes they do exactly the opposite. As a poet I'm always looking at words. Maybe I'm hypersensative, but I don't think I see words the same way most other people do. This is another entry in my series of  Poem Photos, which is a collection of examples where words and images seem to evoke contrary, often opposite emotions from what might have been intended. 

Greenwood cemetery in Rockford, Illinois.

Greenwood Cemetery is one of Rockford's oldest and most beautiful historic cemeteries, established in the 1840s when Rockford itself was still a young community. Located along North Main Street, its monuments and family plots preserve the names of generations of people who helped build the city, including prominent industrialists, politicians, veterans, and ordinary Rockford families.

Like many nineteenth-century cemeteries, Greenwood was designed as more than simply a place to bury the dead. Its winding roads, mature trees, elaborate monuments, and landscaped grounds reflect the rural cemetery movement, when cemeteries were also intended to be quiet public spaces for walking and contemplation. Today it functions almost like an outdoor archive of Rockford history. Walk around long enough and you'll encounter names that also appear on streets, buildings, businesses, and in nearly every chapter of the city's past.

Which makes Greenwood an especially appropriate place to find words behaving strangely.

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Sometimes A Finished Person (A Poem About Gin)

When you have the luxury of working with a great artist like Jenny Mathews and love collaborating with that person, sometimes they go to bed earlier than you and you find yourself in dire need of their talent. Like tonight. "Sometimes A Finished Person" is a poem I wrote last week. Like most of what I write these days it takes on a minimalist stance, not really trying to bite off more subject matter than my talent and concentration can chew. Here's what I did with the poem. The font here is Hobo. The bottle is an actual sloe gin bottle. And enough of my blathering. 

Let's hope when Jenny sees this she'll want to make it into a  Tiny Drawing Poem

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Tiny Drawing Poem (Beaten)

When I was homeless in 2008 I rode the bus a lot. It was a nice place to write. And it was heated. I wrote most of the children's book of poems Atrocities From A to Z on the RMTD bus. This is a poem I wrote about the terminal. The font is Penn Station. 

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The Night Is So Still Dolphins Swim Through It

When I was a child in school I never listened. I knew it wasn't the right thing to do, and eventually they just stopped trying to instruct me and gave me a pile of books to read. Even then i sensed there wasn't much reason getting knowledge second or third hand, filtered through the voice of someone who may or may not even understand it. Given math equations, I ignored whatever rules they attempted to teach me and simply proceeded using my own trial and error methods. Which, given time, were eventually successful. Either I ran out of time or I solved the problems. Always my brain has worked that way. Sort of a solipsistic inductive reasoning machine. No point trying to learn the rules of the game at this late date. Why do I tell you this? I don't know. Because there's more afternoon than I need. Well, because I use design programs like Photoshop the same way. I can't ever learn the hard and fast rules, which would no doubt save me a great deal of time. "Dolphins" is a poem I wrote probably in 1996 on a porch on Quincy Ave. It went into my second book, Detached Retinas. Jenny did this Tiny Drawing last month and told me a few nights ago it went with the poem "Dolphins." Then she decided it didn't go with the poem "Dolphins," but I had already decided it had by this point. So, I put together the Tiny Drawing Poem this afternoon using my usual trial and error design method. The font is Flowerchild. 

More Tiny Drawings

More Tiny Drawing Poems

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Partridge Family Poem

In the summer of 2005 I'd just come off of eight straight years in the service industry. I was tired, I hurt everywhere, and my writing had turned bitter and cynical, like me. Too much time watching people misbehave and fade away. All the poems for what would become my book Flesh Wounds were finished, and I just wanted to try something new. So, I took that summer off, sat on the porch, went to the park, down by the river, and just wrote poems with minimal to no apparent meaning. These were the first poems from my book Submerged Structure. Jenny saw this one last night and decided it went with her Tiny Drawing. I think she's right. 

More Tiny Drawing Poems

Tiny Drawings

As always, we hope you'll link to and share our works. 

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