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
Razed Memories
“Crashing waves
Grief and pain is washed away
Open to the great cessation
Waves wash away memories
Wane and fade
Open to the great cessation”
—YOB
Photograph copyright Mike Yost 2017
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
A Glimpse of Green
A glimpse of green is all I can see
From behind this wasting wall
Erected by solitude and razed with laughter
I’m trapped beneath the mute judgment of decaying brick
Each stone laid hurriedly by coarse hands that shake in the cold
With blistered fingers that crack and bleed and long to brush that smile again . . .
Photograph and Prose copyright Mike Yost 2016
