Decoding Thoughts

Psst She Said, Helena Turinski 2015Psst she said.
The Pistols aren’t revealing secrets.
That which was once thought forbidden forever is trapped in conversations.
The first thing you’ll need is a pen to decode thought
and make your own word play
for there are no secrets here any more.

I really love assembling my random poems. It’s such an exciting and serendipitous process that evolves rapidly as I snatch up cut-out words that seem to fit whatever I am weaving under my hand. I never know where a poem is going to go either. I haven’t actually ‘written’ any for a while because I have such a huge backlog of poems that I have yet to turn into collages.

The words obviously inform the pictures, but sometimes the pictures themselves add an extraordinary power to one’s perception of the poem, such as in this image. The women were cut out from some innocuous advertisement, although for what I can’t recall. The blackness of the figures adds such a sinister tone, especially with the highlighted white teeth, as does the gun pointed directly at the smiling woman’s head; the metaphors are obvious. The strange and stark contrasts make me chuckle – that’s what society is like sometimes – but we should never ignore the undercurrents.