It's Still Life

A Nod to Not Listening

A frail old man
stood
staring out.

He looks awful.
Eyes sunken
and dark.

Skin like mayonnaise.

He nodded at dying,
We’re not listening, he said.

Image: by F. Goya, An Old Man and a Monk. from the Black Paintings series. ©Misky 2022 Shared with #amwriting on Twitter. Text sourced from Jaws, by Benchley, Peter. Digital Jaws. Pub. Pan 70, 2017.

Definition: Erasure poetry, also known as blackout poetry, is a form of found poetry wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains. My method involved layers, changing the top layer’s opacity, and then erasing parts of that image to reveal text from the lower layer/page of text. All 30-days can be viewed on Tumblr at https://miskyb.tumblr.com .More info: https://poets.org/glossary/erasure