Tag Archive for ‘Decay’

Impermanence

I shot this photo with an old Nikon pocket camera after slinking into an abandoned building in New York.

When the camera went click, I wondered:

Who stood where I was standing? What kind of work did they do?  What was the dresser for?

Silence was the only reply.

I stopped my breathing and tried to hear the past.

Conversations only the decaying ceiling remembers.

Locked behind us all in memories forgotten.

Reminding us all that the future is just a vision.

And all that is true reality is the now.

I smiled at how to capture such a precious thing,

Just as the camera went click.

 

Photograph and Prose copyright Mike Yost 2017
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A Container of Memories

I lift my boot and step inside
Feet landing firmly on the front door
Lying flat and motionless on the foyer floor

A breeze kicks up the dust in clouds of white
Plaster as powder filling the air
Filling my lungs

I cover my mouth and squint into the shadows of long hallways
Cracked bricks knocking against the soles of my boots
My cough echoes off the surface of bare walls

Empty walls punctuated with holes left by the heads of angry sledgehammers
One leans alone and inert against the spiral staircase
The wooden handle broken in half

My leg falls through the fourth stair
The brass railing shaking violently as I catch my balance
Wings flail by my wide eyes in a flash of glossy, black feathers
I clear my throat of dust and spit over the edge

Sunlight spills into the second floor
Falling through two vacant windows
Shards of glass glistening in the sunlight
My skin now warm against the silent shadows surrounding me

This house
This mansion of memories
Broken
Mute
Partially absorbed into the ground

But the memories remain
Hidden deep beneath the surface of blank walls
Deep beneath the surface of a blank stare
The eyes looking inward
Into the container of memories

Photograph and Prose copyright Mike Yost 2017
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Silent Spaces

Tolland Abandoned Home - living room

 

Tolland Back of Abandoned Home

I took these at some abandoned houses in the Colorado Mountains.  There’s something fascinating to me about derelict buildings, these silent spaces where maybe children once giggled at the dinner table over a plate of uneaten carrots,  where perhaps a father or a mother wept alone in the shower over the loss of their own parents, where entire families once slept soundly beneath a vast canopy of timeless stars.

These silent spaces now an echo of lives lived, their home slowly retreating into the Earth.

Photographs copyright Mike Yost 2015
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Reclamation

greenhouse roof

“Nature abhors a vacuum . . .”
—Henry David Thoreau

Continuing with the theme of derelict buildings, I took this photograph at a greenhouse long forgotten. There’s some irony here, with nature now taking root in the very structure that tried to contain it.

Photograph copyright Mike Yost 2015
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