The Poet
This poem was written using words from Read Write Word prompt #11. Enjoy.
-Nicole
——————————————–
You set a book to my ribs.
Night after night I unclasp it
at the mirror’s edge
alphabets flicker and soar.
Write in the light
of all the languages
you know the earth contains,
you murmur in my ear.
This is pure transport.
– Meena Alexander
He reads lines. He reads lines pressed into
his heart from a book pressed into his chest,
the pages filled with magic molded with his
bare hands from tumbling, lucid, luscious words
a long time ago. His book, his lines – but he’d
lost his words when they tumbled out to sea.
He had chased them down, but they had looked back,
laughed him to scorn,
and flipped him the middle finger to toast
the stink of his arrogance before taking
the next slow boat to China.
He reads lines. They jangle his memory.
They unlock his forehead – where most people
have a just a third eye, he also has a pair of lips. Now,
with forgotten thunder in his veins,
the words flow,
gently tumbling out of someplace
thought previously to be dark and vacant,
without life. Joy comes, following the words
onto the page – the fire has been loosed
and he is now speaking in tongues,
in words that had become
strangers to him, brittle and almost crumbled
to dust. His core
heats up to a million degrees. He’s
become a volcano. Soon, the hand can’t write fast
enough to contain the lava pouring forth, to
channel it to flow merely onto paper, and it
burns his skin. So he begins to
sing.
And sing.
And sing.
The words jettison forth, rivaling the air for
atmospheric space. They crowd out oxygen, give
hydrogen a pretty chase to the edges of his eyesight.
The horizon buckles under the weight
of the fleeing air. Passersby begin to breathe
words
and the metamorphosis is complete. A quiet roar
deep within a man who had forgotten how to speak
is now a sustained holler pouring forth
from his throat. These
words
which had escaped him,
which had betrayed him,
which had mocked him,
are now his signatures
in this jangling, verdant, tropic air.
Written 3/4/09
© 2009 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
This is a powerful piece, full of great imagery and ideas. I especially enjoyed the stanza beginning, “The words jettison forth, rivaling the air for atmospheric space.” Thanks for sharing this.
-Z
Pretty good Nicole, I like it. I could feel the force of the words.
This really captures that powerful feeling that comes when the words are coming and the mojo’s working. I love this line: “give
hydrogen a pretty chase to the edges of his eyesight.”