42 Love Haiku

Is the other of my two projects for To All Our Future Flames. I originally wanted to make 72, then 101, but constraints of time and imagination limited the project to 42. And then 44.

So the idea was to write a bunch of haiku, post them to the gallery site, and wrap matches with little scrolls of paper containing the URLs. The buyer could then read their little collection of poems at their leisure.

But what sparked this project is that the URLs, like the matches, would be single-use. The script that fetches the poem associated with each URL would delete the file containing that poem before the browser even displays the page. Try to go back to it and you’d get an error:

Bad URLs return a different error:

But good URLs return good poems:

Keeping with the show’s themes of matchboxes, fire, love and implied heartbreak, etc., most of the poems are about love and heartbreak, and most have puns relating to fire or matches.

But not all.

But when it came time to build the product that would be put on the wall, there was a logistical complication. I bought a pack of tiny matchboxes thinking they would be perfect but without checking the number of matches they contained, which ended up being 30-something. So I had to split the project into two boxes of 22 poems each.

But in the end it didn’t matter because no one bought either.