Project 16: Up in the Sky

When I turn my head skyward,

I often see stars,

Dark skies, the moon,

The red planet Mars.

I sometimes see clouds,

A blinding bright sun,

A flock of small birds -

Twenty, or just one.

There are airplanes, phone poles,

Towering trees,

Skyscrapers, smokestacks,

And more things like these.

Sometimes I look up

To something crushing,

When I get a huge eyeful

Of absolute nothing.

Once, and once only,

 I'd just like to say,

"There's a man in a cape

Come to save the day."

Okay, I know I said I'd be done with humorous light poetry, but that's just it - I'm not trying to be funny here. Maybe this is a childish fantasy, but I don't care. Sometime, when things are a mess, I'd like to look up and see someone who will just make everything okay. And I don't mind admitting that.

Okay, on to the picture - This is one of those rare projects where I drew the picture first and wrote what the picture made me think of. As a result, I'm actually much fonder of the picture itself than the poem. A lot of big-name superheroes put a lot of stock in their iconography (think of the Superman "S," for example). For most heroes, the symbol becomes a representation of the hope/ideology the hero tries to bring. I wanted to play with that idea here: There's a lot of iconography going on in the above picture, especially on the signs in be background. Each of those COULD mean something, and yet there's the unmistakable image of the man in the cape, which represents something completely different from the other branded images.

Or, you know, maybe I'm just talking a lot of nothing. That could be true, too.