Tag Archives: Wordle

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Fractured Armageddon

Written 3/8/11 and 3/9/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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This poem was composed for the last We Write Poems Prompt, Make Your Own Wordle. I went with writing the poem inside the Wordle itself which the Wordle website spat back out at me — with some modifications and a lot of help from GIMP (an image manipulation program). The original Wordle is below, and I hope you enjoyed the poem. In case you didn’t know, you’ll need to click on the image to enlarge it.

-Nicole


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WWP Poem # 17: Undertow

Undertow, by Nicole Nicholson

Undertow, by Nicole Nicholson

This week over at We Write Poems I asked people to plug one (or more) of their own poems into Wordle and then write a poem using the most frequently occuring words. As I’ve been pretty busy and haven’t written in a couple of weeks, it was a bit of a challenge, but looking at my Wordle again inspired me to create the above. Blow it up, print it out, save it, rotate it, read it. I hope you enjoy.

-Nicole

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Big Tent Poem / WWP Poem #7: Sixteen

This poem was written for both this past Monday’s Big Tent Poetry Prompt and last week’s We Write Poems Prompt. Two ThreeFour visual versions of the poem, plus the original text of the poem, appear below. Click on each graphic to view it large (you might be able to even go larger, depending on your browser).

Sixteen, A Visual Poem by Nicole Nicholson (version 1)

Visual Poem, Version 1 (Click to View)

Sixteen, A Visual Poem by Nicole Nicholson (version 2)

Visual Poem, Version 2 (Click to View)


Sixteen, a Visual Poem by Nicole Nicholson (version 3)

Visual Poem, Version 3

Sixteen, A Visual Poem by Nicole Nicholson (Version 4)

Visual Poem, Version 4

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When the stars bleed through pinholes
like a heroin serenade walking up the tracks
of an earthquake arm where veins are fault lines
and bruises are epicenters where footfalls land;
Continue reading →

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Big Tent Poem: An Open Letter to A Suicide Bomber

This poem was written for Big Tent Poetry’s Monday Wordle Prompt this past week. I decided to do something a little different this time around. I erased a couple of words from the original Wordle graphic and managed to use the rest in a poem…written directly onto the graphic.

I wrote this, inspired by Neil Reid’s poem, “The invisible human like a bomb”. You must go read this poem, which had a huge impact on me. It moved me to speak to her.

Click on the graphic below to enlarge and read. Feel free to print this, view it in another window, etc. Some of the verses are placed vertically because the original word I used in some cases is vertical in the original graphic.

Enjoy.

-Nicole

Written 6/18/10
© Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

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Big Tent Poem: Crumple-Proof

Big Tent Wordle May 17

You look for my sapience inside
my circuitry. I am
an ensnarer, a woman of neural nets
like fine spun spider webs: silver gossamer
and plastic blue. Wrap that net around you,
and I might embrace you in angel hair or
slice you apart until you give up being human
and become puzzle.
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Poem: Crucify (for RWP Prompt #118)

Read Write Poem Wordle #118

Read Write Poem Wordle #118

In the handsome dark, we fumble for doubloons
lying dead on the pavement.
Little minted mirrors of gold, magenta, turquoise, emerald, and
polished purple riot like the wine soaking into the costumed madness
around us: this swirling, detonated rainbow
of beads, feathers, fire, and flesh. It is fringed, open-mouthed, and
dripping beautiful fermented stink from its lips.
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Phantasmagoria

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.

And BTW, please feel free to look at this poem over on the test blog too.

-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.
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Read Write Poem Mini-Challenge Poem #1: Sycamore

Note: If you don’t want to read the introduction, you can skip down to the poem.

This is the first of hopefully six poems written for January 2010′s Read Write Poem Mini-Challenge (to write six poems about starting over in six days). It was also written for Read Write Poem Prompt #109: Beg, Borrow, Steal, which was a Wordle prompt. I managed to use a good percentage of words from the prompt.

I normally edit as I write (or try to) — but for this one, I found myself writing without an editor, from the more unconscious part of my mind (and perhaps, by extension, my heart), and then going back and editing later. If this seems less linear, that’s why. I also ended up taking my “ash golem” from my poem “Ashes” and bringing her into this poem. I hope you enjoy.

To see other poems for this mini-challenge, click here.

-Nicole

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Drawing blanks and blood,
fertile-thighed, skin scarred, I am a
whalebone artist, carving my dreams in bone apocalypses
and shoving them behind my jaw. Wake up
when I’m twelve, and try rescue those school-day reveries
running in tape-loop, dream-sequence repeats before they
waterfall down my throat and slice vocal chords
into confetti as they fall for their own enjoyment. Thirty-three years old,
whipped into a existentialist froth, I now dare to seek
my old suit of skin that’s been hanging from the
low-bending branches of some lonely sycamore that
the steel mill in town forgot to poison. I see that it’s still wearing
pink, which I forgot how to be
a long time ago.
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Litany to a Melancholic

Wordle from Read Write Poem Prompt #105

This poem was written for Read Write Poem Prompt # 105: Borrowed Words.

NEW! You can listen to this poem on Podbean.

The words led me to write a poem involving one of my hometowns, Middletown, Ohio. One of my goals for 2010 is to finish a small book of poems about the small town, especially those that were formed and/or grew as the result of manufacturing plants. The poems strung together will tell the story of the town through the eyes of a few key characters. This poem will (hopefully) end up in that book.

So here you go. And as always, enjoy.

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Forget that the moon is sliced by the
violence of wire smiles that dangle from
pole to pole. I know you – you notice
these things. Like how
each telephone pole itself is a
victim of modern slaughter, their dead, polished wooden husks
standing on display like
conquered corpses to line this
backwoods Appian Way. Like how
the stalks of corn bend their backs in
submission to the wind and nod their spiked blond heads
towards the city – and you might think Continue reading →

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I, Too, Say Amen

Read Write Word # 23

This poem was written for Read Write Word Prompt #101: P-P-P-Poetry. This is a Wordle prompt in which all of the words begin with the letter P. I used some of the words and added a few of my own in this poem, which is inspired by William Blake (the quote in the poem is from his work “Proverbs of Hell”), Langston Hughes (“I, Too, Sing America”), and one of my own poems that I wrote earlier this year. Enjoy!

-Nicole
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I, too, say Amen.

I am having an early Sunday morning vision
of prophecy:
our bodies slapping together,
sweat running in rivers and casting shattered tributaries
off of our skins. We are somewhere
sequestered, and yet more sacred than the backseat
of my car. We sing Hallelujahs, composed in the key of carnal –
a polyglot of grunt, hiss, and shuddering breath
against a harmony of moan,
countermelodies of our whispered directions, and a
climax of screams in fortissimo. We sound
antiphons to each other, utterances in counterpoint
as we co-create again and again. This
is worship – and I, too, say
Amen.
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Lost Man, River Town

Read Write Word #21

This was written for Read Write Poem Prompt #92: Word Gems. I’ve been influenced by a lot of river songs lately, namely R.E.M.’s “So. Central Rain” and “Find The River”, and “Yes, The River Knows” by The Doors. I was also inspired to write this based on some recent events in my life. This is a long poem in six parts. I hope you enjoy the read.

-Nicole
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Me, my thoughts are flower strewn
Ocean storm, bayberry moon;
I have got to leave to find my way.
-R.E.M.

I.

He wanders,

a coin lost on the carpet,
mingled in a multitude. A flesh-and-bone moth
in search of flame. He echoes stars inside his belly
that look like the strands of Christmas lights
stretched and wound around the arms of fake trees
sequestered to these country club banquet hall corners –
tiny dots of soft brilliance,
glowing against plastic green and brown. He holds
ripe plums in his eyes – ready to burst, ready to explode and
shatter wine-stained raindrops everywhere. He walks the room,
scans the crowd – and their eyes are veiled
by husks that are made of:

grain and grapes
giving up their ghosts into liquid leisure,
decanting their death into glass containers;

blood ties
with picket fences riding those red rivers –
their intersecting joints of white and wood that whisper
neighbor in their eyes in code that only
those stamped with the name of this town
can decipher; and

their memories – tall and brick,
statuesque and green. The nearby river’s deep has
extended her arms
to cover their heads, drown their souls
in the walking sleep of absorption.
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