Every morning, our feet take stretches of road
like pages, like pavements that have not yet
born our words, our miles, our smiles,
our tears. We reach up, we reach out,
we bring wheels to asphalt hoping that the next day
is not split in two by a fissure crack –
or two, or twenty –
of heartbreak. Yes, we humans chase pavements. And we
do it again, and again, and again. I do it every morning,
trying not to look behind me.
Tag Archives: poetry
My Poem “Homecoming” Republished by the Jim Morrison Project
My poem, “Homecoming” was republished by the Jim Morrison Project today. The website is a tribute to the late Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors and published articles, artwork, and (now) poetry.
“Homecoming” was written last year during NaPoWriMo 2011. It was an attempt to get into Morrison’s head and understand what was behind the events of the Miami incident of 1969. Whether Morrison exposed himself or not (I’m inclined to think not — and even then, there were First Amendment implications had he done so), one thing is clear: he was attempting to wake up and reach the audience on that spring night at the Dinner Key Auditorium. He had been inspired by (and had participated in) some performances of the Living Theatre — that night he tried their methodology to get through to his audience. Unfortunately, it ended in disaster and a court case in which public opinion and political aspirations were stacked against him.
Please check out the Morrison Project website. And while you’re at it, check out the fan artwork and prose pieces there. The site is a labor of love. Whatever you think or believe about Jim Morrison, the site is a must-see.
-Nicole
My Poem “Glass and Concrete” Published on Autism and Empathy
My poem, “Glass and Concrete” was republished over at the Autism and Empathy website.
Autism and Empathy seeks “to undo the myths about autism and empathy that have stigmatized autistic people for so long”. The site features prose and poetry by autistics, family members, parents, and professionals. If you haven’t seen it yet, I encourage you to go and read.
-Nicole
Glass and Concrete (For World Autism Awareness Day, 2012)
I place my hands on the glass wall,
pushing against one more boundary
between me and the world, as if my bare hands
could make the wall more solid, less breakable: and when
I lift them up, I see the remains of one language
I speak, an entire matrix of lines, swirls, and whorls
dictated by DNA, stamped onto the glass
in oil and sweat. The handprints won’t tell you
about the endless rooms in my attic brain full of
my memories in Super 8 film rolls coiled up and sleeping
which have been magically appearing since I was a year old;
or the rooms of computer hard drives storing facts, numbers,
and encyclopedia notes numbering somewhere in the octillions;
or the glass-shatter heart that sometimes fractures if I breathe,
or suck in air from the shock or suspended surprise
of someone else’s pain, or when one of my own free-floating
pieces of celluloid with razor blade edges slices my fingers
when I yank it out of my film projector and try
to stuff it back into the canister it escaped from. The handprints
won’t tell you that our family’s collective lips are sealed
about our green strangeness, the unuttered word
that I alone out of the clan speak: autism. The handprints
won’t tell you that I shut my eyes and imagine
the lost, the mute, and the gaunt lit with pain
and pulling razor blades out of their throats
appearing as time-delimited half-tones behind this wall:
Tommy the pinball wizard;
my grandmother made of cedar beams, Indian blood, and elocution;
and a lizard poet, white knuckled, hanging on
to a rollercoaster of pain for dear life,
just to name a few. But the handprints will tell you
that I am human.
I wonder if you can see them: sometimes, I know
that on your side, you only see graffiti-infested concrete,
slapped and glued with headlines about
how our hearts are hollow, how we live as alien mutants
among you in a universe of uncertainty, and how
the word “never” seems to creep into your speech about
us. And you wonder why I erect a glass wall? Some days,
I am forced to pour concrete and hide behind
the wall of cold cinnereal while I listen to the noise
coming from the other side and my eyes
flood and create another ocean: but eventually,
I raze the walls that I construct, and all that separates
me from the world is a stately barrier of glass.
Place your hands on the glass and line them up
with mine: can you feel
the warmth from breath and skin, sweat and
rhythm, blood like tom-toms pounding and marching
all through my body? This is how we can be,
hand to hand, eye to eye, toe to toe, once I feel
I can approach the glass. We touch, and it can melt away
into a membrane, or it can eventually evaporate
and become a ghost that we used to look at each other
through: this is the understanding I need, and the vision
that you need. But as long as you insist on concrete
slapped with pity, pithy headlines, and ignorance,
you will never feel my handprints. You will never
feel my warmth. And you will be convinced that I am a
comic, hollow being that can never feel. And all
the while, I will be drowning in another one of my oceans
behind that wall.
Written 4/2/12
© 2012 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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I wrote this to share today because it is World Autism Awareness Day (April 2, 2012). I hope you enjoy the poem and that it gives you another glimpse into my world.
-Nicole
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Holes
(Lakshmi and Persephone, to Sita)
(Lakshmi)
I don’t want to ask you about
how wide or how large the hole grew to –
I’d rather not remind you it’s even there
at all. When the white rabbit disappeared
down into the abyss, to the other side,
pocket watch in hand, a dandy’s waistcoat
girt about him like an old fool from sepia days,
we did not bid him goodbye, or Godspeed, or even
tears. Perhaps a veiled middle finger out of his sight,
or a “fuck you” shouted down the hole in frustration
for the pile of undone things he left behind — but that
was all we sent after him into the ether;
Continue reading
Sky Drunk
(Persephone)
Every time I come up for air, I shovel
fistfuls of the sky into my mouth: the blue azure
berry wonderlands, tasting like superman sherbet tinctures
until they fade to nothing, climbing down my throat
to join the oceans behind my navel. When
I am done, there is a smear of sticky sweet
spread across my lips in post-hunger, turquoise afterglow –
and Hades knows where I have been:
and that is what happens on good days.
Continue reading
To A Plane Tree
(The Morrígan)
If I could lean on a limb of yours
broken away and cast from your body –
a good solid limb, stripped of its old bark
and bearing brown scaled skin underneath –
then my legs would never give way,
and neither would my heart. If one queen
brought her husband to health underneath your uplifted arms,
then why can I not seek healing at your feet? I need relief
from the slow centuries still settled into my shoulders.
Continue reading
Protected: Fourth Dimensional Widow
Falling Stars
When stars fall, we marvel at what
shakes them loose, trying to see through
the warped glass block view of our tears
long enough to discern whether or not the earth itself
is jarred loose from its setting in the skies and
tumbles down like a errant jewel. We feel
each landing, bracing ourselves for collison,
our hearts grabbing with white knuckled fists onto
ribcage bars to steady themselves — and then, we say
that we cannot handle another impact.
Pele Courts Vishnu, In Human Form
I have had my fingers burn with crimson delight,
electricity climbing nerves like a zig-zag bandit
to the top, tips glowing like thunderstorm light
proudly proclaiming desire. From there, the glow becomes
contagious, ever spreading throughout my
expanse of skin until I bloom, effulgent and dangerous –
I rage and flow inside every Cimmerian night.
Continue reading
A Study in Color
If you see the paint on my shoes,
the imprint of color like lost angels
that slipped from brush tips, fell to Earth,
and landed, becoming color Rorschachs
upon another canvas, then know
that they are the words I lost from between lips and teeth,
accidental syllables of emerald, brick red, and azure
that flew too close to the sun.
Some land on the floor, imprinting onto my soles
once I walk across their wordless surfaces.
Poem for 2012
Can we crash through the ceiling
and rise like newly begotten dreams
to become sky,
transmute into fire to merge with stars?
Do we welcome this new year
like a mad conjurer pushing a pachyderm
up the stairs to a fifth floor walk up
on the Lower East Side?
Do we live in the elephant’s shadow,
waiting for it to fall or do we
cheer the madman on, hoping to resolve the past
while fires burn from the fallen brimstone below?
Do we live, shuddering, half-living phantoms
in a lightless, aphotic crevice of an ancient lunatic’s jaw,
crouched behind a broken, blood soaked tooth?
Or do we lift arms like wings and rise?
Do we greet this as a dawn, rewritten,
the old mistakes as erasures curling inward
and fetal, floating as smoke and dying in the newborn wind?
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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