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: WWP Poem Prompt
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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Signs
Consider this: a white vase of red roses, sitting stately
upon a table, greeting the dawn, casting up its song
of fragrance. One day, a careless wind, an earthquake,
or an errant cat’s paw sends the vase tumbling:
prisoners of a reckless plummet to the ground,
the roses cannot stop their fall –
and the vase shatters into fragments and dust
that will meet and rejoin the earth it once rose from. 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.
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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 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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