This was written for NaPoWriMo #5: A Little Introspection or 50-Word Pickup over at Read Write Poem. The ten words I used out of my 25 word pickup (I couldn’t get 50 words, so I worked with what I got) are in italics. Enjoy.

-Nicole

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I was not built to study ichthyology – but
once upon a time, I swam

with fishes

while the whispers of precepts created
by minds painted with Machiavellian
colors clung to my ears. I searched page
after page, line and line, imprinting
my own damnation into my heart
until it spat back macabre declarations
into my ears – and I shook

from the violence

of my own preaching. Once upon a time,
I was prey for hawk-eyed kestrels selling
belief in the puncture of their beaks. I was loam,
fourteen years old and full of wandering,
searching the cosmos for dreams where I
could find my own face. I was a tree, reaching
up away from ordinary roots with
open brown arms looking to grab stars
by gluttonous handfuls, not caring if I came
back down to Earth with burnt palms –
and looking to grab the

sky

in my arms
and read her closely
for evidence that the preaching
jettisoned from my heart
was wrong. Now I know

that I was never completely consecrated, never
completely baptized in rivers wielding swollen
tongues speaking sorrow in measured blows to
the brain, and my own tongue was swollen
once upon a time –

but I always had an ear
outside the river. I heard amethysts calling
my name, emeralds preaching to the
insane tone-deaf tongue choirs in my
mind, and turquoise moons quoting
strange and beautiful Scriptures
to the tatterdemalion girl that I always saw
staring back at me in the mirror, clothed in
chartreuse birthstones and hiding Leo’s
fiery mane under her ragged, sable
hood. I always knew

that I would be permanently liminal
and criminal to minds enshrouded by
fences that cannot think and divisions
that cannot feel: but I sing the dawn, seeking
like Bono for the colors of God. And I
know that they are still there –

because I listened
outside the river
once upon a time.

Written 4/6/09
© 2009 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

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