Tag Archives: we write poems

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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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Time

Click on the Image Below to Read the Poem. If you are unable to view the image, you may view the poem as a PDF here.

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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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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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.

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Without End, Amen

The gathering at the oak tree gazes up to watch
light breaking through the leaves in lucent blonde fingers;

hallelujah

through the gathering of leaves — the oak’s green sleeves:
a blind wooden eye turns, and the gifts slip through her fingers;

hallelujah

as colors race through the membrane sky –
the rainbow siblings salute us through azure as one;

hallelujah

past the rain, shed to call colors up from
the earthen membrane beneath us, where we stand as one

hallelujah,

and we send back the song as electric impulses,
voices carried through limbs and hearts alone;

hallelujah

is our voices escaping only in breaths and upraised limbs as
we each stand before You alone;

hallelujah

Written 11/29/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

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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.

Process Notes: I basically took the words in the order that they appeared and considered each two to be a pair (gathering/oak, color/membrane, and voice/limb). Once I did this, the images and the story began to emerge. Also, I’ve been listening to “Hallelujah” lately…it’s an absolutely gorgeous and inspiring track and it just makes me even sadder that they broke up…but at the same time it seems like the perfect song for an ending. The spiritual nature of the lyrics inspired me…I wanted to write a companion/answer that would do it justice.

-Nicole
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Hawk Eyes

The sign reads 20 MPH. The hawk: 0 MPH.
He, a mute sentinel of white and tawny feathers, perches
atop its narrow, blade-thin edge to watch
cars pass in the rain: swivel, stare, and then
swivel again in perfect two hundred seventy degree
rotations.
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Kittens

The cat: sky-gray and fence post slender.
Me: twenty-three and in my first real apartment,
in my first real city, outside of short term college hovels
with short term leases and cheap-ass furniture (not) included.
I found the cat while helping a (former) friend
clean out his house, junk-laden and miscarrying memories
like fruit, love, and children that were never meant to be.
A (misconceived) polyamory experiment gone wrong – and now
the house was being emptied of old photos, clothes, and
a barn cat hiding inside every shadow watching humans
flit to and fro with boxes in their arms. In between boxes,
I carried her away, too.
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The Chase

Lord Dream

Lord Dream from the Sandman Chronicles

Following you from dreamscape to dreamscape, I
cannot help but notice the taunt of
a quickly turned head,
an averted glance,
or a frozen neck refusing to turn on axis
to bring your eyes in contact with mine. I have chased you
from the steps of every illusion woven and constructed
from the vagaries of an attic stuffed with photographs
by a lizard brain that demands a coherent storyline.
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Saturn Return

for Amy Winehouse

The forever young are held in a pair of parentheses
made out of 27 years;
the ageless are collected within the arms of Saturn,
exhaling breath at his baleful return.

Each of you has a life cycle,
you all follow the same path from birth to death.
You first enter as a little bright light, a tiny pinpoint of sparkle;
you part the curtain, hiding as white dwarfs behind this
ringed gas giant, fearful of his mythical jaws.
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Vision

I am taking notes
at a fantastic rock-n-roll concert
going on in my head

I always take notes
when the visions come
projectors singing in my head
throw up the screen
and let the film play itself onto it
in endless maddening loops –

freeze frame, focus in on an image
and magnify until the colors rain
into my hands
until voltage notes rain
into my hands
blue and black
royal and midnight

and now, the ceremony has begun
the hills embrace the throng like arms
they gather amidst the green

while the moon assents to the sounds below her
with her own pale light
the night and the people
gather together in thickness
beat like a pulse
hands reach up, trying to
grab the passing purple magic

bodies become pinwheels
warp space and time around them
as they dance an old dervish pattern
while the music spins them on invisible axes
all together now give up the ghost
release wine into air around them and
get drunk on the ecstasy dripping down
in the drenched air

rapt and nearly carried beyond
in my own delirium
I grab the words
I grab the colors
and attempt to translate
this music is a pure expression of joy
another night has ended
with a vision in my hands

Written 7/7 and 7/12/11
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Greetings! I haven’t written any poems in a while but I was intrigued by the latest We Write Poems Prompt. Viv suggested this week that we try to write a poem in someone else’s voice…in someone else’s shoes. It could be a person, an animal, an inanimate object…anything you like, as long as you leave your own voice at the door.

I’ve done persona poems a number of times, but in many cases I’ve always felt as if each one was still my own words. This time I tried my damnedest to leave my own voice at the door. It was tricky, especially considering my chosen subject — I revisited Jim Morrison this week, using two of his quotes and jumping off of them to write a poem (“I was taking notes at a fantastic rock-n-roll concert in my head” and “music is the pure expression of joy”). Comments are more than welcome — please tell me how you think I did. And I hope you enjoyed the poem.

-Nicole
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Change

Kharon by Alexander Livtochekno

Kharon by Alexander Livtochekno

I hold coins in my pocket, refuse to drop them
into Charon’s rawbone hand;
I hold the gifts of my passage under my cloak
back from this boatman’s demand.
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Diary of a Lost Soul

I suffer the dreams of a world gone mad.
I have seen things that you will never see, and the film
is on a maddening loop. The heavens are falling down
and I can’t even breathe.
We turn kingdoms into dust as the violins
fill with water, as the winter takes one more cherry tree.
Everything has chains. I walk the sweet rain tragicomedy and
pass by a thousand signs, looking for my own name.
Have I run too far to get home?
Some die just to live.
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