Here is a page with three prominent words. Each of the words may serve as both noun and verb. The three together, as verbs in the imperative, may serve as three simple instructions with optional complication: Puzzle [out truth through experience]; Play [with concepts and correlation]; Ground [your puzzling and playing with a goal-seeking algorithm]. The three may also be read as two ganging up on the third: PuzzlePlay Ground or Puzzle Playground. We’re going to squeeze these words for all they’re worth here.

I’m at a point in my journey as an artist where I feel everything I’ve done so far, and especially what I’ve done in the last seven years, has gained inertia and inevitability so that new work demands to be done independent of my will to do it, along a path I have less and less control in deviation. Example: I’ve been making crossword puzzle grids for months now. I’m not getting any better at making them, but something in the core of my art identity demands that I keep making them, night after night. Sometimes I use the grids to replicate the crossword patterns in the newspaper, so that I don’t mark up the newspaper to solve the puzzle, but this is happening less and less lately. And there’s a growing sense that soon I’ll be going 3D with resin or PVC, making cubes and other volumes that contain text-units (i.e. alphanumerics), and writing poetry more suited to three-dimensional space; hypercrostic poetry, if you will. Perhaps the hundreds upon hundreds of acrostic poems I’ve done have been merely preparative prelude to what I will be doing. It seems daunting/impossible to do what I’m describing, though.

True story: some years ago a friend of mine had a dream about me. In the dream I was painting three-dimensionally. –Maybe I’m just remembering her telling me about that dream, and now imagining what it would be like, best I can. (I don’t really have to imagine: Philip José Farmer described a means of doing so, as practiced by his protagonist Chibiabos Elgreco Winnegan, in his Hugo-Winning novella “Riders of the Purple Wage.” It is preposterous and wonderfully, wildly imaginative.)

Howbeit, here are the words to my unhyper acrostic:

Party’s dull–perhaps it needs some ZING
Ugly lull–small hope that most’ll linger
Ziggy Stardust’s not along–nor RINGO
Zebra stripes don’t translate to Urdu
Let’s a Maze–a labyrinthine BOON
Enter energy to knit a wound