I suffer the dreams of a world gone mad.
I have seen things that you will never see, and the film
is on a maddening loop. The heavens are falling down
and I can’t even breathe.
We turn kingdoms into dust as the violins
fill with water, as the winter takes one more cherry tree.
Everything has chains. I walk the sweet rain tragicomedy and
pass by a thousand signs, looking for my own name.
Have I run too far to get home?
Some die just to live.
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Category Archives: Prompt Poems
NaPoWriMo Poem #16: Roses and Thorns
To make a crown of thorns,
you must first tear the roses away.
The King is crowned with their stiff, green bodies
withering to brittle, bone, and dust after they
have been seized and stolen from the ground.
Before returning to dust, they stiffened into rigor mortis,
frozen in a circle as they entwine with each other,
thorns jutting out and radiating from an empty center.
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NaPoWriMo Poem #6: Begin With Fire
First, it must begin with fire.
The amphitheater, a darkened and silent blank page
laying just beyond a grove of trees rendered in silhouette,
waits for the first, single spark.
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NaPoWriMo #1: Kindling
St. Rose of Lima, by Jennifer Walterschied
for St. Rose of Lima
I know how to make fire.
It is not I who makes it; I am the kindling. A
cut here, a jab there: and the flame starts,
unbidden. In one little corner of Lima,
an Everlasting fire blazes on.
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Woman
Woman on a Brick Wall -- RONE
From in the shadow she calls
And in the shadow she finds a way
And in the shadow she crawls
Clutching her faded photograph
My image under her thumb
Yes, with a message from my heart
- Tori Amos
The day lights up, cold and blue. Cloudless.
Wings unfolding.
The light gives birth to a woman’s face, plastered onto brick,
watching the streets with two narrow eyes like bisected almonds that drip
faint streaks of branching red below. And she has seen
enough.
For this, she is weeping.
The great mystery of the decade:
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It Will Not Stop
There are birth pains,
and the water breaks in trillion-fold up the coastline spine,
an army marching to where water does not belong –
marching into the streets,
marching into the marketplace,
marching into the suburbs,
marching to obey a command invisible to the ears,
and like Mickey Mouse broomsticks,
it will not stop;
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Fractured Armageddon
Written 3/8/11 and 3/9/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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This poem was composed for the last We Write Poems Prompt, Make Your Own Wordle. I went with writing the poem inside the Wordle itself which the Wordle website spat back out at me — with some modifications and a lot of help from GIMP (an image manipulation program). The original Wordle is below, and I hope you enjoyed the poem. In case you didn’t know, you’ll need to click on the image to enlarge it.
-Nicole
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Stumble It!
Nightmares on Patmos
The flame of a question:
how does one wake from the nightmare
when the nightmare was knitted from strands stolen
from your own epidermis? You cannot possibly understand
the weight of a nation straining, back breaking
underneath a sky that someone told you was no longer yours
to claim: how that sky becomes leaden and brackish when
someone steals its leash and turns its teeth on you.
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Father and Christ
Here’s the broken body like bread, so many
jagged pieces together all dipped in wine: a scratch here,
a drop there. If spines and joints could be chopped apart
like so many broken sentences, this would be
a string of stuttered speech: the King’s oration,
born as a black-haired and fallow-skinned man but now a collection
of words busted apart and barely held together by ragged
strings. A lament of blood here, a dislocated shoulder
there.
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Big Tent/WWP Poem #42: The Way Back Home
Perhaps
if I could unravel the threads that ever live behind my skin, I could
find it. There are so many exposed, raw and frayed ends,
and as I have said before,
I pull on them so that you don’t. Watch me
pull away this sweater of a skin, blow the dust off
my bones, and climb the stairs to an attic
that ever collects: there is nothing sacred and safe
from being stolen from walls, from projector screens,
or from the air. Everything is carried home, purloined
beneath the archway of my arm,
slumbering against ribs cradled with adipose and skin,
nestled in the crook of my elbow.
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WWP Poem #40-2: Trinity
Written 2/8/2011
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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This poem was also written for We Write Poems Prompt #40: Triptych Relationship. I just couldn’t stop. I decided to take an interesting twist and instead of Heaven/Earth/Man, I changed Man to Woman. This ended up being pretty dark, but I just went where the words led me. I hope you enjoyed the poem.
-Nicole
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Stumble It!
WWP Poem #40/Big Tent Poem: To Bless These Tired Throats
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This poem was written for two prompts: We Write Poems Prompt #40: Triptych Relationship and this week’s Big Tent Poetry Prompt, which was a Wordle. I adore Wordles, and I love triptych poems. Two things inspired this poem: 1) a broadcast on CNN yesterday afternoon about the protests in Egypt, and 2) the fact that today in the Catholic calendar is the Feast of St. Blaise, and throats are being blessed today by priests because of this. I hope you enjoyed this poem.
-Nicole
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Stumble It!
