Capture

image by terry s. amstutz, aka moibus faith

Capture

“There are always two people in

every picture: the photographer

and the viewer.”--Ansel Adams

We do cherish our own filter on the world,

trusting it to

alert, cajole, tantalize, tease

and amaze us--

and we certainly deepen our relationship

with our personal perceptions when we

voraciously snap images of chosen portions

of our immediate environment,

passionately prowling

abandoned buildings, alleys, under bridges,

through barbed wire and peek holes

in steel fencing,

finding sweet nostalgia and insight within

the decay, the broken backs of equipment,

the bent corrugated rows on metal walls,

twisted latches, locks, and door handles,

the discarded pieces of clothing,

overcoats, sweaters, pants, underwear, hats,

the molding magazines, 

their pages stuck together,

the torn shards of newspapers,

incomplete headlines dangling,

the single boots,

laces shredded and tongues agape,

the stiff lost gloves,

the ends of the fingers missing,

the solitary feathers

dropped from urban wings,

the crushed cigarette packages,

tiny particles of tobacco still laughing,

the used condoms,

sexual balloons burst by rats,

the broken glass,

piles of leaded colorful beads,

and everywhere the powerful patina

clinging like rusty lichen to every kind of metal,

sparkling with delicious decorative oxidation;

but often even more striking

is the street art, that garish graffiti

that blossoms on the city’s epidermis

of naked brick, box car sides,

the concrete bellies of bridges,

dumpsters, call boxes, phone poles

and abandoned vehicles,

providing us with both the “Neuve Art”

and the vitality of a vocabulary lesson

as fucktard, twatwaffle, assclown, & fuckwit

are added to our arsenal of street speak;

allowing some of us to share the glories

of natural visual geometry and living history

as we gleefully continue our search

for honesty within squalor,

for truth within abandonment,

and for liberty within egress.

Glenn Buttkus

November 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets

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