Tag Archives: WWP Poem Prompt

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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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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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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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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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NaPoWriMo Poem #16: Roses and Thorns

To make a crown of thorns,
you must first tear the roses away.
The King is crowned with their stiff, green bodies
withering to brittle, bone, and dust after they
have been seized and stolen from the ground.
Before returning to dust, they stiffened into rigor mortis,
frozen in a circle as they entwine with each other,
thorns jutting out and radiating from an empty center.
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NaPoWriMo Poem #6: Begin With Fire

First, it must begin with fire.
The amphitheater, a darkened and silent blank page
laying just beyond a grove of trees rendered in silhouette,
waits for the first, single spark.
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Woman

Woman on a Brick Wall - RONE

Woman on a Brick Wall -- RONE

From in the shadow she calls
And in the shadow she finds a way
And in the shadow she crawls
Clutching her faded photograph
My image under her thumb
Yes, with a message from my heart
- Tori Amos

The day lights up, cold and blue. Cloudless.
Wings unfolding.
The light gives birth to a woman’s face, plastered onto brick,
watching the streets with two narrow eyes like bisected almonds that drip
faint streaks of branching red below. And she has seen
enough.
For this, she is weeping.
The great mystery of the decade:
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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 #39: Age of Rain

I. Père Lachaise

Funny how graffiti never pulses underneath your palms,
even if it is red,
even if it does look like blood,
even if it does look like letters who have forgotten their boundaries
and have risen up like fresh, city welts on this skin of concrete. Palms prone
on the stone, you wish for a heartbeat beneath it
and yet, you find none. The poet is still
breathing: but not here. Mime
the curtain falling to cloak a greasepaint face
with the flutter of bare hands. Peel back the rain, and you might hear
a piano tiptoeing past your ears.
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WWP Poem #35: A Tale Told by an Idiot, Full of Sound and Fury

I. Challenger

I give you a song I stole from the dirt: I dream a mess
of ley-lines and leptons, plasma fields and turf giants. Last son
of a dead planet, strongest man in the world. I am a nova,
all-exploding, planet-cremating. But there are
many ways to lose the oldest game.
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