SON LOVE ENCYCLOPEDIA by MICHAEL P.

I don't just love making books. I LOVE making encyclopedias.  I've written one, to date, though that's not yet released.  But I just created a second encyclopedia for SitWithMoi, which I can now cheerfully share with the world!  To wit, the 8-volume SON LOVE ENCYCLOPEDIA (ostensibly) by my son "Michael P."

It all began with the trash.  Remember my son's Valentine's Day gifts this year of red chairs? Well, a day or so after Valentine's Day, I went to the garage and noticed the mess left behind, including pieces of cardboard atop the cat litter.  I assume he'd used the cardboards as backdrop when he was spray-painting the mini-chairs:

Well, I was loathe to just dispose of the cardboard as they were involved in my son's process of making me a gift.  So I took them back to my (ahem) studio: 

In my studio (heeee), I decided to cut up the cardboard into the targeted mini-book size of 2" x 2", then bound two of each with blue painter's tape to create mini-books: 

The result is 8 "volumes" that, together, comprise an "encyclopedia."  I used a blue tape, by the way, because I thought blue would somehow effect the same sense as the old-school (i.e., before Kindle et al) hard-bound encyclopedias.  And, I didn't have any other type of tape around...

Now, I supposed I could have made more than eight volumes.  But a mere eight volumes of the same type of book allows you all to get the drift -- that a son's love is encapsulated by the red-painted "pages" of the book (so we've already achieved the aim, yah?, of "conceptual art"...).

On the front cover of each, I created on yellow paper -- because yellow and blue is always a pleasing combination (and I didn't have any other color of paper around) -- slips with the title and author.  I glued each atop each volume.  The only difference is that I assigned each volume, of course, its own number:

And so: here is Volume I of SON LOVE ENCYCLOPEDIA:

You would open the volume to see the following "pages":

As you can see, no words are necessary. (Such, of course, is one of the things a poet must attempt to master: when words are necessary or not.) The pages simply show the red painted cardboard that was an effect of my son expressing his love through the making of a Valentine's Day gift.  All the interiors are similar for all the other volumes.  Here's a photo of the encyclopedia stacked up:

Now, where shall we "shelve" my son's dictionary of love?  Need we even ask?  Of course they must be shelved on my son's Valentine's Day Gift!