Written 1/16/12
© 2012 Nicole Nicholson, except for items in italics, which are © 1981 David Byrne, Brian Eno, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth. All rights reserved on material by N. Nicholson.
———————————————————————————
This poem was written for We Write Poems Prompt #89: Respond to This. We were to respond with a poem to the following sentence:

“As the Great War drew to a close, a young Englishwoman wrote wearily in her diary, By the end of 1916, every boy I had ever danced with was dead.”

I ended up having two reactions at once: the first was to offer to dance with the woman to help relieve her sorrow and loneliness, and the second was anger at the horrors and practice of war — an insane, senseless affair which has no purpose.

After a little thought, I figured out whose response was whose. What do I mean? Well, if you’ve read this blog before, you might remember that I introduced you to Nick back in this poem last September. (And of course, if Nick is an alternate version of me, he has to be, well, shorter and heavier…but you get the point.) After noticing that a significant number of poems were written in a male voice, I first concluded that this was simply my animus talking. But after some thought, I’ve concluded that I’m probably bigendered — i.e. I have a distinctly male persona and a distinctly female persona (I won’t overload you with extended details, but if you want to knock yourself out, check out the Wikipedia link earlier in this sentence, or this link).

Sooo….both Nick and Nicole got to respond this time. Hence why the two sides of this (loose) cleave are labeled as such. I don’t know if I will label future poems as such, but let’s just say this was an experiment. I hope you enjoyed the read.

And a thank you to David Byrne, et. al., for the borrowed inspiration. The lyrics come from “Once in a Lifetime” by the Talking Heads.

-Nicole
————————————————————–
Follow @ravenswingpoet

Stumble It!

Morning Flight by Nicole Nicholson

Welcome to the new Raven’s Wing Poetry. Or the newly designed RWP, as you like it.

I gave RWP a facelift for 2012. Let me know if you like it. And let us carry on through this year with positivity, peace, love, and gladness.

-Nicole.

The #6 bus makes its paces through the town:
up Baxter Street, past Millege, up Sanford, past
the Library, past the transit center, and then looping around
to Hancock Street. Everything is slick from the

rain, which the bus’ tires play like an instrument
in legato hissing as they bisect puddles on
the pavement: on cobblestone streets, the hissing
is punctuated by the short thuds of its tires

hitting each crack in the stones in countermelody. And now,
here begins the first layer of a dream: a tree
has thrown itself up in sacrifice, its living reflection in the bus window
mutating with every moment as if to signal you;

but it is only vibrating at it bends to the will of the
rain-dotted December wind. In the second layer of the dream,
an old stone building crouches, a shy and errant child,
behind the tree flashing a single orange light;

but it is empty, for its children have gone home.
Beneath these two window layers lies another:
a view of downtown, blurred, hurried, and smeared with rain
and busy shoppers. Try to pick out one lonely man or

a heavy-minded woman wielding a squirming child, and
you will miss your stop, but the brownstones will stay
and welcome you. Tell now, what is
dreaming? You try to reach out to the images through

the Street View, but the window’s faces keep
changing. Is Weird Al peeking out through
the mutating tree branches? This ain’t his town. Did
Abbie imprint himself onto the glass to joint Stipe

and company in this town’s activism and care? You shrug and
keep looking through the window until this shifting screen
slides to reveal another view, and you get off the bus in front
of City Hall to begin your walk to the record store. Its

spartan and dirty vanilla face worn with age stands
window wide-eyed, poster-torn, its third eye neon sign glowing
igneous red-hot instead of a serene indigo or a placid white
heavy with wisdom. You reach out again, and try to push

your fingertips through the digital to feel a cold and solid
glass door welcome: but you remain on this side of the looking glass,
unable to penetrate the Windows. Somewhere, you imagine
Bill Gates smirking at your predicament: between you

and the Universe lies a window, upon which your mind
weaves another layered dream. But how do you visit
a town you have never seen? You read once about a man
in the Bible, Jabez, who prayed for blessing, and God enlarged him

beyond his hands and heart: but how do you enlarge your coast,
expand beyond this window? In the city on the river there is a
girl without a dream: but you are not content to be empty. You,
the dreamer in in ink, reach back into the well to try

again. You have always been constructing your world
out of old dusty pages, pictures, glue, and closed eyes
beneath a starry ceiling, but now, it is digital ink,
virtual pages, and electron-constructed photographs. Nothing
has changed: you are thirty-five years old, and still dreaming.

Written 12/19/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson except for materials in italics, which are copy; 1983 and 1984 R.E.M. Athens, LLC. All Rights Reserved on material by N. Nicholson
————————————————
This poem was written for We Write Poems Prompt #85 — Rinse, repeat, windows revisited and One Single Impression Prompt #199: Inkpot. For the WWP Prompt, we were asked to mentally erase our last impression of the window image, and write another poem fresh and anew. I tied this poem in with the OSI prompt (which I have not written for in a VERY long time) and threw in an old, long-standing wish to visit Athens, Georgia…which right now I can only construct through a tour of Google Maps, all of the research about R.E.M. I have done (this was one of my major special interests in college and still is), as well as my memories of the music.

-Nicole
—————————————————–
Follow @ravenswingpoet

Stumble It!

You call it magic? You marvel
that a man who cannot force his lips
to form spoken words,
to utter what you call language,
can howl and thrash like an insane shaman
and slam his soul against canvas, leaving the imprints
as pictures of a landscape you never knew
or had forgotten; or how he
gently chains hallelujahs end to end and lets the
resplendent pageant be born onto a blank sheet; or how
fingers under incantation can play jazz
like heliotropes, jade, and indigo love. But
let me tell you this: within the seat of each one’s soul is
an invocation to communicate, to become
mirror and window, voice and instrument,
verse and refrain. Mine has merely chosen
to channel itself into the visual.

Please understand one thing:
I am not magical, not a savant.
I am just a man throwing his colored speech to turn blank paper
into the tableaus which form themselves in my mind
and soul. And understand that while
I cannot mold my lips around vowel and consonant to tell you
how much I love you
or this world,
or this entire existence connected together
by spirit, double helix, and wormhole, I can
keep showing you the canvases: so keep
watching. And if you do, you will eventually
understand me.

Written 12/14/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

————————————————–
This poem was written for this week’s Poetic Asides prompt, which was to write a magical poem. This poem ended up being both magical and not at the same time — a contradiction almost until you read a little further. I have read about artists on the autism spectrum, both verbal and non-verbal, who find that while they may have a difficulty or even lack of ability to communicate in speech, the communication happens through their art. I am the same way — the words find themselves out through my fingers via keyboard or the pen onto paper with much greater ease than through speech. This poem takes a look at the visual side of this phenomenon, using the visual artist as an illustration of it.

-Nicole

———————————————–
Follow @ravenswingpoet

Stumble It!

Leaf leaves the mother tree in its falling flight,
descends to die in the earth at her feet.
Leaf becomes soil, and soil becomes womb;
leave the childbearing to winter’s chill and
tales of a babe born and laid in a manger;
								                        selah.

Tree becomes testament, and book is bound,
its reflection white and glassy in the store window.
Read the window, tell the tree to tell her tale
in textbook and tome, story and poem,
or Scripture born on a pale, thin skin;
								                        selah.

Tomes of tombstones, one errant in the reflection
while blurred winter wind and sky imprint onto the glass.
Soil becomes tomb as another year goes to sleep,
bedded down beneath snow, sidewalk, and an aging sun
while rainbow lights color each cornflower Yule twilight;
								                        selah.

Brownstones rise from the earth with aplomb
while Christmas bells chime and call choruses forth.
The choirs, the organs, and the digitally made song
cannot reach the man, distant, imprinted in the window –
distant and singular in this season of joy;
								                        selah.

O glass, what more will you impart
in this season of both ashen day and resplendent night?
Birth and death pass each other with wary, cautious eyes,
unsure of the true ruler of these days –
is it the cold claiming our breath or the warmth of our hearts?
								                        Selah.

Written 12/13/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
————————————————————–
This poem was written for this week’s We Write Poems Prompt. My poem ended up being a psalm based on how the images in the picture called out to me and the interplay between them — and the words associated with them.

“Selah” is a word used rather frequently in the psalms of the Torah/the Old Testament of Bible. According to Wikipedia, it is “a difficult concept to translate”; it might be a liturgical instruction or indicate an instrumental break. Anglican clergyman and Biblical scholar E.W. Bullinger believed that it was a conjunction between two verses of a psalm, possibly to illustrate a contrast or a cause-and-effect relationship. The suggested meaning that caught my eye the most — and is how the term is intended to be used in this poem — is “pause, and think of that”, which is how the term is translated in the Amplified Bible.

-Nicole
————————————————————–
Follow @ravenswingpoet

Stumble It!

You see bodies like broken dolls free-falling
onto the clean and deserted pavement.
Blood slides out of tiny crevice and huge chasm wounds
and joins the shells of flesh as they collapse and land
onto the asphalt. You swear that you can see
breath exiting as the bodies hit the ground – but the breath
always climbs upward, leaving its old ribcages behind.
Now, there is nothing left but smoke and desolate silence as
crumpled bodies and crumpled trucks lay empty
underneath the orchid, scarlet, and maize colored dawn.

Suddenly there is only blackness –
you fall from dreams into waking –
and land with a sudden jolt –

and there is only you, your trembling limbs,
your quivering nerves running scared up and down
the length of your body,
and the half-lit cloak of night that kept you company
while you slept. You sit up, shirtless and sweat-drenched,
the survivor of yet another head-on collision
between you and nightmare.

II. I forgot my shirt at the water’s edge

You break the water’s membrane. Diamonds
tumble off your skin, free-falling in droplet haiku
that catch the light of a halcyon sun. You stand,
rooted for a moment in the sand and water where
ocean and Manifest Destiny meet: this is where the West ends
and you begin. You are naked, cleansed, and unspoiled,
just like you were years ago before the nightmares began.
And for a moment, you forget about everything:
Time easing its sand grains through fragile blood vessels,
your shirt lying placidly in a wrinkled heap on the sand,
and the broken bodies free-falling through your dreams.

III. every streetlight a reminder

Shirtless, you rise from your bed and
gaze out the window, leaning forward,
resting your palms on the window pane.
A Cimmerian nighttime burial shroud
made out of shadow and quiet is draped around
your shoulders, hair, and back:
only your face and bare chest blaze coolly
with the half-dying sallow light of the street lamps
laying a few yards beyond your window.
They lift their torches like worn-out sentinels
over the black mirror street below them that
lies slick and battered with the night’s endless rain.

It is 5:00 A.M., and the only open eyes
belong to you, the streetlights, and the rain.
This time, there are no more nightmares, only
the battered wisdom of cramming sixty years into twenty-five
that settles in your bones, your sleep-bereft brain,
and the nagging cough that keeps you awake at night.
Can you feel it now?
The hourglass grains are free-falling through your chest.

IV. the moon is low tonight

Highways are endless,
and shorelines are endless. The moon
is also endless where water and land collide,
where the West ends and you once again
begin: this time, it is Elysian here. There
are no more nightmares, no more broken bodies free-falling
and landing next to crumpled trucks; no more vacant nights, no more
standing alone in a loveless and lonely gloom;
no more nagging cough,
and no more wondering if anyone understands.

I still try to understand, and
I always will. Sometimes, I flip through a book of poems
to see if I find your words there. Sometimes, I listen
to the wind to see if your voice rides it to my ears.
And sometimes, I visit the same beach in my own dreamscape
and let handfuls of its sand slide through my sieve hand: for I know
that one of these nights, a droplet cast off your skin
that became a diamond will rest in my palms,
begging to be cleaned, shined,
and taken home with me. I will never be content
to walk away with nothing.

Written 12/2/11, 12/6/11, and 12/7/11
Original material © 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
Material in italics © 1992 R.E.M. Athens, Ltd.

—————————————————————————
This poem was written for We Write Poems Prompt #83, “All Good Things”. In this prompt, I suggested looking at an ending, writing about it, and at the same time trying to imagine what happens beyond that ending. I don’t know if I answered my own prompt well, but I did give it a try. I hope you enjoyed the poem.

-Nicole
________________________________________________
Follow @ravenswingpoet

Stumble It!

——————————————————————————
This week’s poem was inspired by two things: 1) “Hallelujah” by R.E.M., which appears on their latest release, “Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, and Part Garbage” and 2) the We Write Poems Prompt this week which suggested that we look at words in pairs and the relationships between words. The picture is courtesy of Rampaging Poet from Deviant Art.

-Nicole
—————————————————————————————
Follow @ravenswingpoet

Stumble It!

You can see all of them in the short film for my poem, “Letter to My Father”, which I uploaded today to YouTube. This film was featured at The Art of Autism Exhibit. The poem will appear in the 2012 edition of “The Art of Autism”.

One might believe that there is an incongruity
within a doctor who can rescue a young toddler
playing in a sea of vomit inside of a South Indian hut
eviscerated by a village’s cholera outbreak, but yet
finds himself becoming windswept detritus tossed
from coast to coast by a stomach which demands
a constant schedule. One might place
his wide-armed compassion of raising that boy himself
and his Richter scale tremors at finding his office disturbed
as light-and-dark contrast Polaroids, and wonder
if the two men were even the same:

but upon closer inspection,
you will find the same golden threads running
through both men’s arms.

Tug on one of the ends: it will lead
to his youngest daughter, the misfit
of the family. Pull one up in the backlight
of noonday sun which streams through your window
to watch an opaline rainbow running in corkscrew
down its entire length. Pull a little bit harder
and follow its spindly trail: and you will find
a son made out of piano keys and vinyl records,
a German face with an Indian hue.

Now look just to the left of this man and his
threads: and you will see a hardscrabble banshee
with African hair and Irish temper, made out of
stolen sparkle, Cherokee prayers, black feathers, and
words. Notice a forgotten, loose end of the same gold thread
sticking out of her forearm: pull on that thread
and you will find the Harlequin root of her DNA
building engines made out of motley parts
and trying to find Sammy Davis, Jr. when he looks
in the mirror. Walk that thread backwards, and you will find
his mother: a proper AME church matriarch with
diction and grammar stolen from Queen Victoria’s
throat.

As you waulk the wool that the threads
run through, listen carefully for the brogue song
that tells who we are, composed out of
encyclopedia pages cited from volumes inside
mind attics and heart chambers. Listen to the son’s rhapsody
of organ pipes, electronic sampled sounds, and the
callouses of wood working fingers that
built the greatest organs on Earth. Listen to the lament
of the banshee, coughing up feathers, rainbows, and
the discontent of the souls out of place that she
builds her poems from. Listen to the hymn
of the matriarch, made out of perfect third and fifth intervals
carrying the proud swell of flawless grammar and clean pages
upon their backs. If you keep listening, you will find the
antiphony of the doctor calling out to cell and gene, bone and blood
to find what spawned the wayward hungry cells that killed his mother, or
the deep-throated tenor guitar and boom-chicka-boom
of the black man mining the wrinkles on the Man in Black’s face
for his own answers.

Hear us, O Children of Gaia,
and harken to our songs, O People of Earth:
we are one tribe,
one motley crew of thread bearers.
We may seem both mean and resplendent by turns,
causing you pause as you watch us walk as
eccentric collections of puzzle pieces carrying veins
of iridescent gold throughout our skin: but do not ask us
to occupy aphotic closet corners with the
cold, throttled throats of your own green fear. Do not ask us
to bisect our puzzle-piece hearts by ripping out the threads
as a sacrifice, extracted treasure without the soil
that it is buried in. And do not ask us
to wear masks, for we are not phantoms: we are made
of the same clay as you are. The sooner you
learn this, the sooner that we can live among you
as siblings bound by soul, spirit, and the signature
of Divine hands: shun us and our imagined strangeness,
and we will all perish together as fools.

Written 10/28/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
————————————————–
This poem was written as one of my contributions to Autistics Speaking Day, which is November 1. For more information about ASDay, click here. For this poem, I began with my fiance’s grandfather, who was a surgeon and medical missionary serving in Andhra Pradesh, India from the early 1930′s until his death in 1968. After many conversations back and forth, we figured out that his grandfather likely had Asperger Syndrome, which is from whence he gets his autism spectrum traits. I thought I would begin by exploring the surface contradictions of this man, who could show great compassion and empathy and yet experience troubles common to spectrumites such as a greater than average need for routine, predictability, and order. And the poem took flight from there. I hope you enjoyed it.

-Nicole
———————————————————-
Follow @ravenswingpoet

Stumble It!

We chuckle at his perch in the rain.
We remember he is the same hawk – buzzard –
that picked off the baby ducklings in the
courtyard between buildings this summer. We call him
stupid for sitting in the October drizzle
biting like tiny bullets into exposed skin, fur,
or feathers. He doesn’t hear us.

The buzzard watches us drive to the where the
path around the campus meets the street
until our last tire connects with the main road. We
think of the ducklings. We think of our hunger.
Inside, the crucifixes hang on the walls just around
the corner from my office: one man, a sacrifice for many.
Twelve ducklings, a sacrifice for one. The hawk eyes
turn once again on a swiveling head to watch
the next car pass by.

Written 10/25/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
————————————————-
This poem was written for this week’s WWP Prompt, Instant Poetry, offered by Joseph Harker. He suggested that we write a poem about something that happens in an instant — five seconds, perhaps. This was a challenge for me, as y’all know that I love breadth and depth when I write. However, I was able to focus in on a single moment that happened last week. I hope you enjoyed the poem.

-Nicole
————————————————-
Follow @ravenswingpoet

Stumble It!