Whistle the Truth
A found free-verse poem
a new language,
a shift in the way
the public felt
these images
if properly chosen
whistle the truth.
women no longer
lipstick and eyeshadow
the pages of dreamy
soft focus apparitions
rejected in favor of a bold
crisp modern ideal.
Author’s Note: This blackout poem was hiding inside one of my earlier Rolodexes, part of a series of 144 collaged card diptychs. I had almost forgotten it was there, tucked inside the work like a message left for a later version of myself. At the time of its making, I had recently left my marketing career and was trying to unlearn the polished language of commerce in order to find my way back to the stranger grammar of the studio.
This piece belongs to the legion of unshared art I have somehow managed to create, keep, and avoid in equal measure. So it goes.
There is a strange little valley where writing, image-making, and documentation begin to overlap. For me, that place often feels difficult to enter, even when the surrounding labor is familiar. I can forage and sort thousands upon thousands of scraps without boredom, but looking directly at my own work requires another kind of attention.
Returning to this poem now, I recognize it as part of the archive’s hidden machinery: language held inside image, image held inside a larger field of fragments, and that field quietly rearranging my life around it while I was busy not looking.
Your Friend in Collage,
