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: poets
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;
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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.
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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.
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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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How to Dream
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
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This Is Not Magic
I can’t explain how I do it
and when I try, I can only point you
to the canvas: there is speech which keeps
refusing to exit through lips and tongue
and insists on taking its form
as colored chansons upon a blank face –
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Window Psalm
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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Free-Falling
I. I’m not sure all these people understand
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.
