Thanks, Jane. I played with it a bit more during a prolonged power outage in LA. Glad you like it.

RCL - Nice edits. For me, that latest reads more like a complete poem and less like part of a game.

The only change I wondered about was in the last line, although it did make me want to know more about 'No Heart Jack' who sounds rakishly piratical.

Work has left me very little time to play, but I got to the scissors and glue tonight!

So, here's my visual response to RCL's After Walter’s No-Man by Jack:

http://sarah-janecrowson.com/wp-cont.../01/no-man.jpg

Jane, that's weird. Scrolling changes it. If I look at the top half, it appears that the edges are bent backwards, but if I scroll down, lose the top half and look only at the bottom, the edges are folded forwards. Hmm. bending. Maps and metaphors... poem coming...

Response to Jane's response to Ralph's response to Walter's response to Jack.
 

Here Be Dragons

They told us first in stories
Here be Dragons
and we would warm ourselves at the familiar fire-breath
knowing the saint would save us.

They told us next in sea-charts
Here be Dragons
and we would know it meant the unsafe place
where the not-known met the misunderstood.
We were safe, knowing better.

They warned us, did our elders,
Here be Dragons.
Washing our hair when menstruating killed us,
sitting on cold stone benches gave us piles;
we survived all their nonsense.

They dared us in the doorway
Here be Dragons
but the room breathed out careful conversation
as bright light glittered off the splintered laughter
and there were no dragons.
Only a silent, shifty-looking elephant.

Ann, that's amazing.

I love the ending, and so sadly, deeply true - the shifty elephant in the room is the monster.

I also love how, in my reading, this moves from hearth-fire to renaissance voyage to early (20 folk-myth to the fractured half-truths of (21 conversations.

if no-one else picks this up I will.

Sarah-Jane
(any strange effects of my previous image are complete chance btw)

Thanks, Jane, you get my drift. I wonder if anyone else noticed the optical illusion of the bends or sees a coy little elephant in the centre of your image.

An image - I hope...
 

I hope this works...

No. It didn't.

I couldn't get it to upload any of the images I'd made (photomontages) and it seemed a bit of a cop-out to use something off t'interwebz. I now can't add an image to this post so I'll keep trying till I find one. It seems a shame for the game to peter out for want of an image, so...
.

Trying again...

Hi Annie,

Normally, to get an image to display you'd need to upload the image to another site (I use flickr) and then link to it using the IMG tags (or the "insert image" button).

Which poem is your image a response to? I couldn't work it out.

-Matt

It isn't, Matt. A response, I mean. I have responded to all the images that have gone up so far and since there are more poets than imagisers and nothing left that I hadn't reponded to, I thought I'd start a new one.

I won't do it again, though, if you have to use all those wossnames that I haven't got. I have quite a few jpegs of photomontage set-ups that I've put together but they wouldn't download onto here. This daft photograph of my feet, though, it was happy to accept, so I said soddit and attached it. I was just trying to be proactive.