Words Over Kansas

Words feel like art to me. Museums manifest portraits of phrases distinctive in content and style. Landscapes listen as locutions rain down from sky and grow up from fields of harvested wheat. Installations involve consonants sprinting to vault vowels while scattering crumbs of  words and letters across the ground. Sculpture Parks parade bronze parodies of unique stature across green lawns in living color. Wouldn't it be fun to roll in a gigantic iambic pentameter? How about working out on slides of S and C and the forever O? Or, hike to the peak of capital A to catch a Technicolor rendering of a new commentary for old readers seated on multi-colored zafus. How to reach level ground after the peak of A? Bungee jump to join the contact sport of phonics. Or, if not up to snuff, sit with the Yellow Birds on their low risers of great expectation. Enjoy the alphabet's 26 paratrooper patrol positioning into paraphrase of limitless number in the sky at sunset. Stars rise. Quiet up front! Hush. Poets are reading their poems in the middle of the street. Listen. Close your eyes. Words feel like art to me.

Words over Kansas

I took the photo while traveling from Colorado to Missouri. It is the high plains of Kansas and is starkly spiritually beautiful. The rainstorm from the low hanging clouds forced us off the road and we spent the night in a small motel in Colby Kansas. The morning was cool and clouds followed us into Kansas City, Missouri where a heavy and quick downpour caused flash flooding throughout the city. We found our home dry and pets well taken care of. Life is beautiful and sometimes I notice. I scanned the photo and processed it in a graphics program while adding words and letters of unprocessed thought.

During August in Kansas City the garden turns beautiful in less elegant dress. It is more yellow than red and rose. This morning we hear warnings of temperatures so hot "you could fry an egg on the sidewalk." I personally know the fact of this as true. When I was a disbelieving ten year old my father took an egg and me out to the sidewalk in front of our Topeka home. . .the egg fried.

Flatter than a pancake

We were driving home through Kansas and again were overcome by its unique beauty. Ground and sky. Summer blue is lighter and sweeter than the sky of other seasons. Summer sky is heavy with calories like a rich desert--perhaps that is why it falls all the way to the ground. As children, we ran across the fields to get to the sky ahead so we could jump on a cloud and ride over the land thick with black and yellow sunflowers--turns out it, the sky, stands here, right here. This WordLayers is an essay about "flat Kansas" written word upon words tumbling onto a simple cell phone photo.