Emergence by Nicole Nicholson

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d
From wandering on a foreign strand!
– Sir Walter Scott

I. kinship

If we are all sparks
then we emerged from a striking of flint:
an eye opening, a dawn rising
inside a celestial pupil that was open like palms,
open like a nail-scarred wrist. A dream,
woven while awake: a wish,
exhaled like newborn stardust out of the lungs of
a collection of tangled desires curved like embryos
and gestating inside this open aperture. We
sat up and greeted the first morning’s light breaking
through the slits of half-closed eyelids;
we watched as millions of fire, rock, and water balls
careened out from the center of nothingness and took their places;
we congregated, freshly born from sleep
before walking through the gossamer curtain
separating life from life. The new, green Earth
was awaiting our footsteps.

ii. exit/exile

There are stories
of how we were separated from God: how it happened
depends on who you ask. Some blame
a devious serpent, an alluring fruit, and a naïve woman:
the promise of an expanded mind and soul
to rise above the dawn and know as much
as God. A separation born of consequence:
we birth, we pain, and we die within
this microcosm like a desert with the noon-day sun breaths
of demons on our necks. And they say we bleed
the badges of our sin from our wombs monthly
by orders of our crescent moon-shaped DNA.

Some say the gossamer curtain itself was the reason
and called it Maya: once we slip past the seams
and part it in our birth, we have left. A exile of necessity,
children leaving home to live and learn lessons,
exiting in halves instead of wholes: the problem is
we go blind from the threads of the curtain once
we slip out from beneath its folds.

iii. dreaming

The dream hangs heavy in more curtains
over our eyes: from this dream we dream more dreams
and their opposing nightmares. We sleep, conjuring a strange chimera world of
winged black horses, scimitars, gravestones, and deconstructed dead;
invisible lines dividing creeds, nations, and skin colors;
fractured children dancing with broken femurs to the tunes of
songs written by our baser selves with leather belts and acrid words;
threats in the language of missiles with points poised and waiting
for the push of a button like suspended breath.

And yet, we also draw threads
made out of silk, spectrums, and chocolate;
embraces for long unseen friends that perched, wings folded,
inside our hearts until they emerge in flight;
joined hands;
the serendipity of a mother hen with ducklings dragging ripples across
the surface of a lake;
and veiled bridal chambers, each a world within a world
where heartbeat is language and love is spelled out in
fingertips, flesh, and open doors. We weave these
continuously into the dream, a band of spastic creators
who cannot collectively decide the final outcome: but
our aim is clumsy*. The chimera rises in wobbly, uncertain flight
while our dreams keep the monster aloft.

iv. twilight

I wander through this fabulous insanity that
not even Lord Dream could have conjured. I collect
bruises on both skin and soul; my ears are filled with shrieks and knives;
my face hides the imprints of fists and slaps. If you
look closely, there are damnations imprinted in my back
in leather belt invisible ink. I enter convents and whorehouses alike,
finding vacant corners to meditate and keep pulling
shrapnel out of my body. I sew up tears;
I build and raze down walls by turns. And all the while, I am
writing lamentations into my arm, praying
that someone can discern within the bloody letters
a map out of Hell.

But the blue hour is piercing through
my half-closed eyes: it is made out of prayers:
sang aloud, quietly mused, shouted through curtains of tears;
bouncing off cathedral walls in languages that almost died;
hanging from the leaves of trees as counterpoints to the beats of drums;
floating in curved bismillahs like rise-and-fall melodies from the top
of minarets;
breathed as a Prabhu Yesu from the lips of a bowed head. I watch,
holding my own unseen severed umbilical cord in my lap
and feeling its free end like a vacant mouth
still trying to gobble passing stardust.  I frighten myself
and fold my hands as you talk to God*.

v. awakening

I will toast to the end of Ignorance:
may it die a fabulous and speedy death.
Bullet through the temple that shatters bone,
or a clean entry wound like a silent, bloodless circle
through the forehead: I don’t care how it goes.
I am mad, and am conjuring up the sight of miracles
while quaffing the magic like peyote wine
behind my third eye.

We’ve been hounded to death by our own
Frankenstein monster, the collective daymare that cannot decide
whether it wishes us well or seeks to slit our throat.
With each desperate whisper, we try to take apart the sky
to see beyond the azure; we rip every passing temple curtain in twain
to see the wizard behind  pushing buttons and
booming declarations into the microphone.  Now, strip away
the burnt skin off our broken body;
cleanse the stampede of dirt off our wounded and harassed soul.
We can redraw this dream again.
Each enchanting daylight pours through
the membranes of our closed eyelids and calls us to try again.

vi. om

Drink blue lotus wine,
walk cobblestone pathways and discover
hidden maps; follow them as the flowers’ soul
unfolds in liquid petals and hitches rides on blood cells
throughout your veins. Somewhere behind your third eye,
the euphoric ecclesia congregates and reunites.

Until now, you’ve been parting the curtain in stolen moments
with a hesitant, quivering finger
to watch a happening: these human-shaped sparks
assembling into a spilling of light that melds with
the glow that birthed them in the first place. You’ve been
placing one hesitant toe on the homeward path and then
retracting it again at the first sign of guilt: how could I ever
go back home? I am a collection of broken shards
of clay: I am a broken doll with chipped porcelain skin
and a bloody dress. But you cannot fight
the call: so keep walking. I will be walking beside you,
looking eagerly towards the glowing light
behind the curtain.

Written 6/14/11
© 2011 on material by Nicole Nicholson except items with asterisks, which are courtesy of “The Way You Dream” (Asha Bhosle and M. Stipe) from “1 Giant Leap”. All Rights Reserved.
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This poem was written for We Write Poems Prompt #58: Double, Double, Toil and Trouble, courtesy of Richard Walker. The prompt called us to select a prompt from one site (I picked One Single Impression) and words from another prompt site (I picked the Sunday Whirl). I also took some inspiration from “The Way You Dream“, a song performed by Asha Bhosle and Michael Stipe on the album “1 Giant Leap“. I hope you enjoyed the poem.

-Nicole

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Stumble It!

No, it began with just his fingertips
trailing a gentle beckon on the back of my shoulder: it is
time. And without words, the whole thing began to coil up
inside our loins, its blueprints drawing themselves
inside the red velvet temples within each of our chests softly
beating, beating, beating. There was only this, and
a bed, ready for us, ready for our bodies. It needed us
to knit it together, in the space between:
belly meets belly, skin meets skin.
Legs separate, and the gates open to the garden
as a prelude to the dance where proto-stars
swirl, explode, collide, and then swirl again. You humans cannot
possibly interpret this: you would bruise and break your bodies
like so much altar bread if you even tried.

A caress, a kiss, a nibble:
and the orchestra grows and swells into frenzy
its musicians try to knit another heaven inside me by
sending notes up to the ceiling to swirl, explode, collide, and then swirl again
like the dancing stars below them.
It needed us to give it the space for the music,
in the space between,
in the veiled sanctuary inside me. You wonder
where Moses got his Holy of Holies from? It is a translation
of where my love’s seed entered
and the stars swirled, exploded, collided, and then swirled again;
and the notes swirled, exploded, collided, and then swirled again;
and the life inside me began to bulge, throb, and glow. And now

it starts to erupt in a neat parade,
in the space between,
an exit without pain slowly leaking out of me. It begins
to slide past my love’s belly, and he dismounts quickly
to get out of its way, landing softly beside me. With his
two arms encircling me, we watch the whole thing happen:
stars, sky, sun, and moon;
planets, comets, and clouds;
land, sea, and air;
tree, fern, and fruit;
crops like straight rows of blond and green soldiers;
the four-legged, the six-legged, the eight-legged, and the hundred-legged;
the winged and the finned,
the furred and the scaled;
and finally, the two-legged, you. All slowly
flow out of me, still swirling in their own little coruscating dances,
no longer exploding or colliding
but gentle moving into and laying themselves
in place. As I said, this birth is painless,
and gravid with joy: and bathed in our own sweat
and the stardust from their first exits out of my body, we
watch it happen, soundless. The void filling,
the black erasing itself,
the whole universe emerging from one act of love.

Written 4/12/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

And answer me this: how does what you call a strip of film
slip from the reel and hang by its own tangled neck inside machinery
and not destroy itself on an altar of flames,
shrieking prayers made of its own spectrum-colored blood through a prism,
pleading to its God for one last act of mercy, one last act
of deliverance? That is both
my story and your story, though you have never felt
the edges of the pages slice through thigh and shoulder,
through calf and cheek: or bisect spine and carve
outrage into breast. Yet, you and I may not be
so far removed from each other. You think in film, so I will
speak in it, and I will tell you this:
you know the filmstrip of your livid and dusky ancestors.
It began with fire and drums; it ended with hollow, hungered oceans
and a dying light. Ours began with a gift of breath
and a sequestered garden: shall it end with a fist to the solar plexus,
the juncture of where heart and soul meet?

I tell you this not to sway you, but to help you
understand our collective acts of defiance: it is
revolution without sword, fight without fist. It is a clash of wills
between a boyish king drenched with the typical stench of arrogance and
a collection of believers with souls of tear-stained glass.
And it is not just a refusal to mold wayward worship of an ephemeral Caesar
out of our now-poisoned clay shrouds of flesh. There is also
the matter of how he paints the walls of his empire with blood –
our blood, slave blood, and even barbarian blood –
and builds his streets with our bones. How he flings our souls
as splattered tapestries against the walls of the
Amphitheatrum Flavium.

If you wish to say more to me,
I will not stop you. I only ask you to remember this:
for every night that these horsemen haunt you;
for every turned corner in a dream that yields a
hollow-eyed golden beast belching fire;
and, for every black locust with outstretched claws and jaws
aching for the flesh of your back,
there are many more gasps and screams uttered
from my own lips. The only difference is, my nightmares
are real.

Written 3/2/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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This poem was written for the last Big Tent Poetry Monday Prompt, which was a doozy! We were given not only a Wordle, but an additional challenge of trying to incorporate one, two, or all three of some additional phrases given to us by Carolee Sherwood. And this is a first: I worked in not only all of the Wordle words, but included all three of the phrases. BONUS!

-Nicole
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Stumble It!

-Nicole
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I have a horror of all trades. In my vision I saw
a million charming creatures moving in time to
beautiful church-music, Power and Peace, noble ambitions, and
lord knows what. These, it was promised, would
bury the tree of good and evil in absolute darkness, would
banish despotic proprieties, freeing us to love purely
in the pure land. It’s the vision of numbers; eternity, the
shoreless ocean in the sun.

We advance towards Spirit.
Like him, I’m eating myself alive.

It is these moments of awakening that gave me
visions of purity! I know them all. I’ve seen
an ocean of fires and smoke in heaven:
to the left, to the right, all the riches of creation blazing
like a million thunderbolts. Out of
the sea, which I loved as though it would wash me clean, I saw
the cross of consolation rising. Do I know
nature yet? The hand on a pen is a
hand on a plow.

We advance towards Spirit.
Like him, I’m eating myself alive.

Hard night! It began with boorishness; it
ends with angels of fire and ice. Spiritual combat is as brutal as
human wars. I who called myself an angel above the law and a
seer, I return to the soil with a duty to seek and rugged reality to
embrace. But if, from now on, my spirit was
always wide awake, we might still get to truth. Let
prayers gallop and lightning rumble! Via the spirit we
go to God!

We advance towards Spirit.
Like him, I’m eating myself alive.

Composed 2/22/10

All lines taken from Donald Revell’s translation of “A Season in Hell” by Arthur Rimbaud.

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Note: Most of Rimbaud’s original text and Revell’s translations are formatted in prose. Thus, instead of strictly borrowing lines, I chose to use entire sentences. In some cases, Rimbaud would join two sentences with a semi-colon; thus I bent the rules a bit for this assignment and took the liberty of using each of these sentences separately or combining them with other sentences. I composed this piece using a loose version of the bop form, as detailed in Read Write Poem Prompt #67 and this Get the Lead Out post over at RWP. This form was invented by Aafa Michael Weaver and is composed of three stanzas with a refrain. You can read more about it here.

Stumble It!

This poem was written for Read Write Poem Prompt #114: All Over The Map. I decided to continue the narrative that began in “Endgame” and continued in “Emmaus”. The words led me to a dream sequence experienced by the character in both poems; it is constructed in three Six Sentences pieces with two short interludes in between. I hope you enjoy the read.

-Nicole

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I. A Dead God’s Chest.

Your mind unfolds, tumbling out jewel-wrapped candy like a cracked-open piñata minted inside a pirate’s fiction. This is the stuff of little boy and girl pretend, of cinemascope phantasms dreamt alive in the dark. It is made out of crowns, galleons, doubloons, and blessed by curses like the clown-painted Aztec god grin baring teeth at you from the face of an underbreath promise: take my treasure and you die, mortal. You laugh like the sunset dancing diamonds upon the water that holds your ship aloft, but a sword swishes wet and red in your ear, drawing its double-dog-dare-you onto a blueprint that looks just like your neck. It’s the eggshell crack that you never hear until your boots break through a wretched, open floor. And on the way down, you will see those boots embedded inside that grin, lodged between eyetooth and incisor as a testament against you, just before your back splits apart upon Hell’s floor.

II. Interlude.

fade to blue
fracture your eyes open
peer through the slow sting of waking and check the clock
watch burning red digits in the darkness
(2:05 A.M.)
wipe the wet from your face
wonder if it was sweat or the ocean that baptized you tonight
and go back under again

III. Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachtahni?

Your prayers are your hands, turned with palms up and lightly cupped like dying lotuses. They’ve been nailed to the desert floor – you are affixed to your own death by a single, thin, rusted spike of iron driven through each hand. Lubricious, the nails revel silently in the steady fountains of flood that your palms offer up as a last chance for absolution. Panic sits in the seat right below your ribcage, turning green, cold, and qualmish deep within your core. Beneath your belly lays the desert floor adorned with crumbled dust in red, peach, and gold; it pushes against you, an arid earthen barricade refusing the sick green terror trying to flow out of your stomach. And since you cannot leak it out, it will force your blood to keep escaping you in penances and black-veiled novenas that will parade in processional after your casket.

IV. Interlude.

break surface
sit up and shove the covers away
wonder if you really did scream
listen for the crash of its echoes against your walls
check the clock again
(4:07 A.M.)
shudder
inhale to chase the demons out of your own throat
restrain your armies of tears
and go back under again

V. In The Temple

First, you toss lit joss sticks at your little clay gods, your idle idols, like sweet sticks of TNT to detonate your broken bottle prayers; they stare at you, wordless, with stone eyes and open grins. Next, you crumble to your knees and press your cheeks against cool stone to relieve the fevered longing that still burns in your face. Then, you push the arabesque of the green jade temple floor into your forehead like a rubber stamp from God, hoping to imprint into your mind the memory of what they last told you before you exited the Throne Room and dropped your whole self into this body. After that, you hear the crackle of water tumbling itself in nimble time over the rocks outside; you rise to your feet and follow the sound to its source. Breaching the glass door threshold, you walk into the clean, leaf-fringed garden and kneel at the feet of the little child of water that pools to a stop in the center. You reach out with one hand, slide your fingers into the water, and then you remember what your last instructions were: above all else, never forget to forgive yourself.

Written 2/17/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

-Nicole

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The trinity of you, me, and God
cannot stand on the head of a pin. We
cannot split hairs, dividing truth from
truth – because this one thing is truth,
the fact that

one man’s God

is another man’s devil. It has to
do with faces – I wear one, you
wear another, and we change masks
every lifetime and century. But
it also has to do with

mirrors. Look into one sometime,
and tell me

if you don’t see the wicked strains
of dichotomies digging too-soon wrinkles
like World War II trenches into your
face, pursing curses into your lips,
and tossing empty dogma face first into
your mouth until you hurl it back
out again in a stilted rhythm keeping
perfect time with the pleasant sounds of
your own personal whipping boy being
thrashed and bled to death inside your
brain. And you ask me if

I

am insane
for not believing the same strains
of Holy Writ-cum-philosophy
that you do.

And before you think that I shake my
fist indiscriminately and only at things wrapped
in Jesus cloth and speaking in tongues, then
consider this: I cannot stand to see women
commanded to lose the desire from between
their legs or to sing muted songs and suffocate
inside black cocoons, or to hear the blood-steeped
howls of upper-caste jeweled Kalis as they dance
on the back of browner Shivas. And I speak
this because I’ve felt the

lashes of damnation

upon my own skin because the music of
finer and blood-bone worlds
calls me to dance and pound the borders
of Africa into the floor with my feet

(it used to wear the skins of blue notes
and sorrowed molasses-dripping voices
begging their souls back into their bodies –
then it spoke the language of rock and roll)

and I refuse to bleed anymore. So call me

wicked

if you must, but I wonder:

what will you do if
the face you see when you
cross the translucent gossamer veil
from life to afterlife

does not match the one
implanted by books of old
and words of fire
into your mind?

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

Stumble It!

This triptych poem was written for Read Write Poem prompt #46: Dervishes and Wine Odes. In short, we were to “write about the Divine through an image we don’t usually use”. I’ve always experienced the Divine the most when out in nature, hence this poem….

Now you’re wondering what the heck a triptych poem is. It’s an experiment of mine.

In the art world, triptychs are works of art divided into three sections, or panels, which may be hinged and folded. According to this article at Wikipedia, “the triptych form arises from early Christian art, and was the standard format for altar paintings from the Middle Ages onwards”. Apparently, the triptych form was also used to build altarpieces in churches and cathedrals.

I used the physical art form as an inspiration for my experiment. The triptych poem is divided into three columns, with the columns displayed side by side horizontally in print – like the three panels in a literal triptych.

Now here’s the really cool part – you can read this kind of poem two ways: a) reading each column down in succession until you’ve read all three columns, or b) reading each line across the three columns. A good triptych poem, as I’ve done with this experiment, should be able to be read coherently and be lucid both ways.

I hope other poets try this experiment. This was a lot of fun to compose. Enjoy!

-Nicole

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Written 9/26/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

This skeltonic verse was written for three prompts: Poefusion’s Tuesday Title (Deep Fried Gravel), Simply Snicker’s weekly prompt (using the words: wander, wonder, weak, wilt, and wit), and today’s Meme Express Prompt (which includes this quote by George Eliot: “The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.”).

-Nicole
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I wander
with wonder;
through the diverse
corners of the Multi-verse,
I traverse
to immerse
myself in stardust,
satisfy my wanderlust.
It’s just
a passion of mine
to travel through time
and space -
to chase
the magic of creation,
to find its foundation,
and capture its formation
imprinted on the stars;
the scars
burned on obsidian,
photoimaged on crimson
Arizona cliffs,
river shifts
chronicled in silt.
I may wilt
from the sensation
of the radiation
of a thousand suns,
but not one
has killed me yet;
better yet,
I may fall
from the wall
of death and skin my knee
on rocky debris
or deep-fried gravel -
but I will still travel
to unravel
the mysteries that open sky begets.
I only regret
not sooner breaking open
my heart and finding my chosen
questions which tether
me together
with insatiable curiosity.
The atrocity
is not following
this calling
of knowledge to seek.
A weak
admonishment arises
in sensible guises -
“curiosity killed the cat”.
I’m not down with that.
I despise fetters
buried in cautious letters
which form sentences
like ones I have served,
unjust and undeserved,
but reserved
for those who
ask too
many questions.
I should mention
that I am not afraid
to invade
on my knowledge crusade
the land of held-back truth
of which in our youths
we were denied passage to;
so if you
stand in my way,
or try to delay
me by putting
mindless, maddening
bullshit in my path,
you might not see my wrath -
but I’ll admit
I might sharpen my wit
on your thin
onion-skin
and leaving you bleeding
and pleading
for something
for anything
to ease the pain.
In disdain,
I’ll walk away;
for today
is too short, and tomorrow
might be drowned in sorrow -
and I have galaxies
and fantasies
and truth
like a sleuth
left to discover
and uncover.

Written 7/29/08
©2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

This was written for the One Single Impression prompt (Melody). Here is my take on the prompt, written as a pantoum. Enjoy.

-Nicole
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A T C G
four notes to compose
every organic living thing
cellular symphonies

four notes to compose
every living score
cellular symphonies
sound in concordance

every living score
two note intervals
sound in concordance
within a Great Opus

two note intervals
base pairs
within a Great Opus
amino acid harmonics

base pairs
four letter melodies
amino acid harmonies
music vibrates in our flesh

four letter melodies
every organic living thing
music vibrates in our flesh
A T C G

Written 6/22/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!

This one *is* actually for the Simply Snickers prompt: write a poem which includes the words “father” and “find”. I decided to take a spiritual take on the word
“father” and wrote this kyrielle. Enjoy.

-Nicole

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O Father God, I find forever encoded in all flesh
Your handiwork, and I see that in Earth below
together in perfection chromatic elements mesh -
Gloria in Excelsis Deo!

And the sky above, a seamless transformation
of blue day and black night, giving gentle snow,
rain, or sun in exact seasonal harmonic orchestration –
Gloria in Excelsis Deo!

And in that vast sky, as day and night backgrounds
change, the thespian cast of planets, against the glow
of stars, dance in your Wu-Li celestial drama profound –
Gloria in Excelsis Deo!

The drama plays multi-staged in fauna and flora
as all together breathe, feed, drink, move, and grow;
surely this clockwork of Creation reflects the splendor of
Gloria in Excelsis Deo;

But perhaps the grandest moment is when I dare
To look in the mirror and see that even though
Sin’s fingerprints reside, that Yours also are there.
Gloria in Excelsis Deo!

Written 6/9/08
© 2008 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Stumble It!