http://youngamericanpoets.blogspot.com/2008/11/elegy.html

And heck, while you’re at it, check out the rest of the poets on the site. Some amazing stuff.

-Nicole

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This was written for the Read Write Poem Prompt #47: Of Monsters and Dinosaurs Enjoy.

-Nicole

————————————————-

bone upon bone
ash upon ash
dust upon dust
femurs meet like cursed wood to form a cross
death at the epicenter
frozen inside the still, lifeless ground at my feet

I can’t help but lean in for a closer look
the books
I have read
of dead men and lizards
cannot compare to the sight before my eyes
I could curl up and sleep inside the motionless skull
I’m sure this Rex was a skyscraper in his time
devouring creatures into his windowless inside existence
his stomach a machine of nutrients and death

my heart stabbed, my arm goes numb
I am alone on this stripped, earthen, bone-pregnant ground
I fall into the arms of dust
to sleep forever
where my bones collide with his
to form more crosses, bear more shame
of a life unknown and forgotten
no one waits for me on the upper layers
of continents shifting slowly across the rainbow
of millions of years, dragging ten thousand shades
of brown dirt upward to form
chocolate and caramel strata

maybe someday
they’ll dig me up too

Written 10/9/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

This was written for the Monday Mural Prompt on Poefusion. Enjoy.

-Nicole

————————————————–
Your voice is a soft bed with clean
sheets. I can sleep in it. I can dream
in it. I could drift away in the sea of
your songs, the currents of your sonic
rivers.

Your voice gives me chills. Nightmares
and dreams in stereophonic luster playing,
bitter and sweet traveling through
headphone cords.

Your voice makes my heart bleed. It stops
clocks. It makes angels pause and men
cry. It makes the Universe

halt

and hang there, suspended, warbling.

Your voice is a footprint stamped onto
time itself, static – yet it stretches even
beyond the borders of the time-space
continuum and mocks the idea that
it could ever be restrained by our
asinine notion of containing moments,
people, and voices inside clocks and
calendars.

Your voice hangs on my ears. I wear
your lyrics for earrings. Diamonds
stand and scream in envy of the sight.
They know that they could never hope
to compete with the resplendent beauty
of your words hanging on my ears.

Your voice sometimes encircles my
neck with icy fingers, choking me
with surprise at your dark emotions
and images but leaving me breathless,
panting, wanting more – and I am a
masochist to the core. I cannot stop
listening.

Your voice has launched countless
ships of fools – motley poets, song
writers, and bands who hear the siren
song of music, beauty, and pain. They
launch their stars into the night sky,
adding to yours and growing into
wickedly wild sparkling constellations.

And I send up my star along with them.

Written 9/16/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

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This chained lune was written for One Single Impression Prompt #29: Seeds. Enjoy.

-Nicole

————————————–

the heart of
a young girl is fertile
ground for sowing

seeds which grow
into shoots which send up
tiny rose buds

which then bloom
into the magic of a
first teenaged crush

all it took
was a song and a
stroked wailing guitar

soft purple rain
watered my garden, made these
gentle shoots grow

and in no
time at all, you became
my royal Prince

at thirty two
I still stand at attention
when I hear

the soprano wail
of your guitar that cries
like a dove

Written 9/14/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

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This was written for Read Write Poem prompt #44: Elegies and Rememberances. Enjoy.

-Nicole

———————————–
(for Karen Carpenter)

A.M. radio
nineteen and seventy nine
I hear you keeping time
a beat against which sonic softness and lyrical wine
were painted and sainted

you sounded like an angel

but you built your shallow gallows
and hung yourself by funhouse mirror images
which blew your star up into constellations
and turned thin shadows into fat overcast midnights
you thought you were too much
for the universe

so your heart expired
and your drums retired
your steady rhythms faded into a faint tattoo

then silence

we keep time with your ghost rhythms now
burned into vinyl grooves
and shining digital data lines on plastic discs

don’t you remember
we told you we loved you, baby?

we still do

Written 9/14/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

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This was written for the Tuesday Title prompt at Poefusion. Enjoy.

-Nicole

——————————-
beautiful fractures
China doll eyes
and a body too thin
to sustain you

hairline breaks
nobody can see
except you
and maybe me

a girl cannot live
on crackers, club soda
and heartache

eventually
she disappears
into the void
that lies somewhere
between
life and death
sickness and health
an in-between ghost
afraid to exist

beautiful fractures
China doll eyes
and a body so thin
it’ll betray you
into sleeping death

I’d break every mirror on Earth
to keep you alive
to keep you from seeing
the Grim Reaper in your
own reflections
the spectre that hisses at you
from beyond the silver glass
to die, die, die

I’d steal you away
from the siren pied piper song
I’d cover your ears
to block out the screams
from the devilish chorus
that propels you to
refuse sustenance and waste away

those beautiful fractures
are in your mind, girl
they need mending
before they break you apart
and all I am left with
is a lifeless corpse
and China doll eyes frozen shut by death
and beautiful fractured memories
of your life

Written 9/9/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

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This was written for Read Write Poem Prompt #42: Catch Some Words. I actually had composed this early this morning, before I even knew about the prompt…..

I had come across the poem “Abortion Stories” when reading a book of Jim Morrison’s poetry…and then found out that the words later became The Doors’ song, “Peace Frog”. These are the words that caught me:

“Indians scattered on a dawn’s highway bleeding,
ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind.”

From there, I was inspired to write “Nightmare”. Enjoy.

-Nicole

———————————-
(for J. Morrison)

You were five.

This was when they still called you “Jimmy”.

You saw them scattered on the highway,
standing outside broken and smashed trucks –
some weeping, some bleeding. You begged
your parents to help them. Do something.

They called the police and an ambulance.
But you kept pleading, perhaps for the souls
scattered and shattered before your eyes,
perhaps for yourself, or perhaps for both.
Do something.

Frustrated, worn out, and perhaps exasperated,
your father then told you that what you had
seen was just a dream. A nightmare, even.

So you took that nightmare and buried it in your
skin. Buried it in your soul. You took that nightmare
and spun it into tales. Showed us the faces of your
nightmare. Some of us understood. Some of us
did not. Either way, your life became a rich, elaborate
nightmare that exhausted your mind and body. And
you projected that nightmare into the skies and
into your words.

And one night, you collapsed under the weight of
that nightmare with only a bathtub filled
with a few inches of lukewarm water
to catch you when you fell.

When you fell, the earth fell with you.

And we still can feel her shaking.

Written 8/28/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

This was written for One Single Impression Prompt #25: Homecoming. The title is the actual name of the current and 14th Dalai Lama. Enjoy.

-Nicole

fourteen stones
winding, smooth, and wet
across a cold, spinning river
laid end to end
in a diagonal pattern of stars
homeward bound to Heaven

the fourteenth comes undone
and floats in the gray, clean river
spinning out of control
floating onto different coasts
colliding with river-planted boulders
different hands receive him
different hands pick him up
and hold him

smooth stone skips
across time and space waters
fourth dimension rivers
cannot hold him
as he searches for home

Written 8/17/08
© 2008. All Rights Reserved.

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This is a ballad written for Read Write Poem Prompt #37: Hotel California. Simply, we were to write a ballad. Since I don’t normally write ballads, this was a real struggle for me, both in finding subject matter and in writing the actual ballad itself.

-Nicole
——————————————–
Who will sing about this singer
and the liquid, blue songs
pouring forth from her heart and veins
now that she is long gone?

I will tell her indigo tale –
it is this poet’s gift
to a fellow comrade inside
the Melancholic Trip.

Cast into the outer darkness
of mockery and fun,
teenaged Janis Joplin endured
a youth of being shunned

by classmates ensconced deep within
Port Arthur’s small town walls.
Yet she, nurtured by outcast friends
within her high school halls,

found her Zen, for they turned her on
to quivering, electric blues
music, which shouted from its home
inside of vinyl grooves,

then wrapped itself around her mind
and heart and yanked, pulling
her to the San Francisco scene
where she began to sing.

Her first songs were sung with guitar
and a typewriter’s rhythm -
and “Typewriter Tape” was the name
of this bootleg album;

but the music was short-lived – speed
stripped the flesh from her bones.
Her alarmed friends raised some money
and then sent her back home.

She turned into a demure girl
and enrolled in Lamar;
but from her first love, music
she never could stray far.

Austin pulled her to its stages –
she sang and played guitar;
yet unbeknownst to Janis now
in the thoughts from afar

of Big Brother and the Holding
Company she had been -
so right back to San Francisco
to join them she now went.

Mainstream Records took their voices
and then refused to pay
the band’s way home from Chicago.
By this, she went astray,

for the band, flat broke, had to move
in with the Grateful Dead;
within walls of brick and time, she
re-found drugs, it is said.

Meanwhile, they graced many stages
and the camera’s eye
burned them onto film forever –
under Monterey’s sky

they weaved a sonic tapestry
punctuated by cries
penned first by Big Mama Thornton
but now before the eyes

of a spellbound crowd, were sung by
Janis. More stages would
follow – sadly, more drugs also
would follow, and they would

lead to her end; but before she
disappeared into death
she made more music with other
bands, and then by herself.

All this time, she rode a wicked,
sick, winding train of smack
down addition’s railroad, from which
she would never come back;

the train would derail, dumping her
body in a hotel
room, cold and lifeless, petrified
from a drug and drink hell.

Left behind on sonic tape and
digital dreams, her soul
still speaks to us – one only has
to listen for the cold

rain deep inside her keening voice,
the sorrow drowned by drink –
Southern Comfort was said to be
her choice poison. I think

that this Southern Comfort could not
comfort her pain-struck heart.
Now, I look into her eyes and
wonder how far apart

I am from the kind of heartache
that made her sing the blues;
though some are stamped with greater pain,
our end is what we chose.

She once said, “I’m a victim of
my own insides.” Let all
of us who claim art as our true
vocation never fall

victim to the temptation of
dulling the inside ache
we may feel – it may be the clay
out of which we create

these stories, songs, poems, and pictures
which warm and speak to the
hearts of the human race. It is
best to feel all of the

pain. Let’s not leave this Earth too soon
and those behind, perplexed,
wondering what unsung strains of
truth and beauty were next.

Now I’ve told her indigo tale
as my best poet’s gift
to a fellow comrade inside
the Melancholic Trip,

she will live on forever through
captured liquid blue songs
which poured forth from her heart and veins -
she will never be gone.

Written 7/28/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

This fib chain was written, actually, for both of the Rocking Chair Prompts this week: “What’s really on your mind?” and “What days in your life will you always remember and why?” Enjoy.

-Nicole
—————————————————-
for
some
it was
Kennedy
gunned down in a car
in broad Dallas motorcade daylight

for
some
it was
Doctor King
a giant cut down
death on a motel balcony

for
some
it was
John Lennon
brilliance in words
silenced forever by bullets

for
me
it was
Kurt Cobain
as MTV News
announced his terminal silence

and
that
moment
forever
remains frozen fresh
in my seventeen year-old mind

Written 7/18/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

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