Were it not for my mad
paint and canvas soliloquies, odes to this world,
haiku of scenery, and elegies of the dead,
you might never notice me at all. I’d move
soundlessly through your world like a flesh wrapped ghost –
buttoned down, broken lips, dismissed
as the man with a vacant mind and no voice;
a rocking horse man, a bird man
flapping arms like Alcatraz cannot hold him. If I were any older,
I might have been a man of closets, of white walls, or of
padded rooms. Or the trickster Coyote as man, accused of
holding demons in my limbs, of
trapping my glances and gazes in my eyes out of avarice,
of letting speech ferment in my mouth out of spite,
and of walking in soulless shoes.

Can you pull your souls out of your shoes
for just a door crack of a moment, just to see
what kinds of colors I have picked up from your world?
Years ago, you had banished the black from your lunch counters;
corralled the red into wastes of dry death land;
built the railroads out of yellow bones and broken ties;
made pale fragile souls from the green land
scrape streets with bare bones fingers;
shoved the rainbow strange behind charcoal prison bars – and now,
you look at me and see nothing but puzzle pieces, ribbons, and
a cause.

Listen carefully: I am not green
like the dollars you raise to cure me,
or sable like the pocketbooks you pity me with,
or white like the institutional walls
you used to sentence us to live within
like some dry, dead ghosts that you cannot exorcise. But
I walk this earth in canvas shoes, paint splattered like a motley skin –
and the black, red, yellow, and rainbow
have imprinted their umbra of fallen colors
upon my soul. I might only possess the eloquence of paint,
flapping arms, or touch screen, text-to-speech oratory –
and sometimes, the branches of the speech nerves in my brain
become too brittle and shatter, breaking off and flying away
as wordless screams. But I am no less a man, and
I contain multitudes of words, breath, and colors.
I will not march to demand your notice,
and I will not hold signs to demand your respect. Know that
I am comfortable with silence and my unexplained brain wiring –
but I must ask you one question:
are you comfortable with me?

Written 2/5/12 and 2/6/12
© 2012 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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This poem is for We Write Poems Prompt #92, Big Shoes, suggested by Donald Habour. The prompt is about civil rights. I kept having the image of shoes floating through my mind, and then the non-verbal autistic painter who first appeared in “This Is Not Magic” rose to the surface to speak. I was also further inspired by this CBS News broadcast in late 2011 about the use of iPads to help non-verbal autistics communicate. And I hope you enjoyed the poem.

-Nicole
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Stumble It!

We raise signs. We shout refrains. We occupy
streets. We declare our sacred humanity
in the faces of endless jaws,
all of them boasting rows of broken teeth,
all of them leaking out decrepit and crackled souls
balanced barely on the edge of decay, bloated with money
and with eyes filled with Revelation death schemes. We weave dreams
in the face of the dreamless. We crash through ceilings
in the face of the weighted down earth bound
with leaden and sick bellies turgid with blood. We transmute
into fire to defy the burnt out ends of older days,
bleary-eyed and spent, exhausted from the chase of what
can never be found, coin-heavy and power-charged. We merge
with stars in the face of those that declare that Heaven is a figment,
or an insane man’s wish, or a wasteland not fit for
habitation.

Hear me, Oh people. You must know one thing:
ceilings only serve to hold in. They deserve to be
crashed through, torn through their bellies like paper declarations,
eviscerated to clear the dirt of sleep from freshly opened
Eyes. You must know that the stars can be
held in the palms of simple hands and that
dreams can be weaved again, re-imaged from
the rubble of broken years. You must know that
fire will not burn you if you become it and that
angels are ordinary people. Check for the
wings emerging through your back, for the power
to lift beyond ceilings and clouds that you never knew
existed. And as you move through this year, ever checking
your compass, eying uncertain prophecies
and promises of oblivion, remember that wings
serve to make their owner fly — and if you rise to
the sun, they will never melt away.

Written 1/29/12
© 2012 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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This poem was written for We Write Poems Prompt #91: Kissing the Ceiling (the image for the prompt is here). This inspired me to move beyond a mere kissing of said ceiling…and with all the doomsday 2012 stuff in the zeitgeist lately, I wanted to write at least one thing that would counter all the fear and negativity. I hope I did my task justice.

-Nicole
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Stumble It!

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.
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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
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Stumble It!

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
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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
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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.

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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

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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.
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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
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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.

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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
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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
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Stumble It!