JRRT/LOTR - an Ambigram

Here is an Ambigram I created. Viewed one way it reads: JRR Tolkien; when rotated 180 degrees it reads: Lord of the Rings.

- rotated -

*Ambigrams, sometimes known as Inversions, are words represented in a highly stylized way so that they can mean something more, or something else, from a different perspective such as when inverted, reflected or rotated. In this sense they are like little visual poems - ambiguous in meaning and hopefully eliciting an emotional response of some kind.

My favorite ambigram artists are:

• Scott Kim, who did some work with Douglas Hofstadter in his 1980 Pulitzer Prize winning work Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Scott Kim /Douglas Hofstadter
• John Langdon, best known for the work he contributed to Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. John Langdon

Perpetual - another Ambigram

Here is another ambigram of mine that wraps the word 'perpetual' around a circle, reading correctly even as it rotates upside down.

FLAVOR #32

Chin up, he watches the
Ceiling fan as if it
Was a wonder

The air inside the ice cream
Parlor cools car hot
Skins as mouths melt

When he turns from fan
To father, smiling, I kiss
The chocolate from his tiny face.

DELICATE CELLS

Vine scales
shattered brick to bridge
the rooted earth to sun,
Scattering flowers,
markers on its glorious voyage.

I sense
this finely braided nerve,
this half-created, half-evolved
thing
Ringing with the pulse
and snap of all
that passes.

Delicate cells
of purest thread sewn through
and through us,
Thinnest wires wound
within us, wrought
of twisted strands of gold
and flesh.

This love
is not electric light
nor draping cables, colors tied
to emerald ropes
It is law
an act of passing
Conduction
of the fields and flows of us.

THE GIFT OF THADDEUS POE

When Poe invented poetry
It was really quite by accident I’m told
He wasn’t sure if he could say
Exactly what he meant or why
He’d phrased it quite the way he had.
In other words I’m sure intent had less
Responsibility than simple serendipity.

Thaddeus Poe, a quiet lad
Of twenty-one or twenty-two, not sure
If he were sane or mad, wondered
At the things we do and why
All things are just the way they are.
Those who recall the year are few; the poem
Was first writ by Thad, one autumn night with pen and pad:

“While standing, staring at the stars
Marveling at the majesty, I wonder
If the moon and Mars are somehow
Gazing back at me.” He paused
A bit to read his silly verse,
Liking the rare simplicity of phrase,
And yet the rhyming “R’s” and “E’s” he liked the best by far.

“Sometimes I feel the universe
Is looking at itself through me, and I’m
A single drop immersed in waters
Of a shoreless sea,” he wrote
That night as if it was heaven sent.
Yes, Poe invented poetry it’s said
For better or for worse; for some, salvation; some, a curse.

MATTERS OF DEGREE

Read of machines
intellectual as grasshoppers
Signing apes
inventing curses
Teaching ancient whales
New tricks
And what of the chemistry
in a handful of aeons
that grows cortexes from
Furrow to fruit;
made a wild beast mean,
A strange madness meaningful?
Consciousness by Degree
(difference not departure)
Remember the vicious history
of smiles
The passive gesture of palmed claws
We are poets of an atomic age
With nothing but our ignorance
To sustain a prideful shuffle
From one big bookend to another.
Stumbling is our poetry

Don’t mention, Your hand raised high,
Love
That part of the
chaos of sub-atomic particles
We make unique only in
The way we twist it
Inflicted like a weapon
upon an indifferent cosmos.
Personification of nature is (not) a lie
Just a fraction of an
Impossible truth
too terrible to tell
too beautiful to know.
Still we must sense it
By Degree
Or lose it as we are lost.

Send your prayers by punch card
(damned if you expect R.S.V.P. by
Many-legged Messenger

DIS GUST-

(with apologies to e e cummings)

dis Gust-
ing when the weird drug-
dealing simple
brained ballonman
whistles farts and winks

and eddieandbill come
running for quaaludes and
LSD and such
things

when the girls wear purple-underwear
the queer
old balloonman whistles
farts and winks
And bettyandisbel run screaming

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and
the
goat- breathed
balloonman whistles
farts
and
winks