Young Writers Society

Poems That Flew in on a Mountain Wind

Poem No. 143
A gravity has settled in my bones.
It weighs me down
and I find
that I can't
seem to move.
I eat, and sleep, and pretend to smile.
As if that would kill the sadness
that follwed me down
from the mountains.

Poems For Resale

Poem No. 37
Fox of fire,
fox of fear.
Fox of desire,
flaming here.

Poem No. 38
This Cat-O-Nine-Tails,
oh how she burns in all her
golden, flaming grace.

Poems For Barter

Poem No. 52
Lonely penny on the ground,
lonely penny that I found.
Pick it up with eyes aglow,
pick it up and don't let go.
Claw back home on padded feet,
Claw back home on midnight streets.
Add the Penny to your hoard,
saving up for your reward.

Poem No. 53
Slinking Slyly Silently on Fickle Fancy Feet
Colored Crystal Crowning Haughty Highborn Head
Lithe Limber Limbs, Tawny Tail Twitching
Graceful Gem Sparkles Sohisticatedly

Poems found along the way...

Poem No. 39
Sweet songs can do more
than put you to sleep: they can
be downright deadly.

Poem No. 40
Floating, all round like the moon,
I fancy I see a balloon!
It's stretchy, I think,
and very bright pink,
and it treats me with quite a tune!

I guess I still have room for other poems after this project. I can't work on it ALL the time, right? And how else am I going to do the poet's universe thing?

6/30

Even though I already published this, I think I will post it here too.

Widdershins (NaPoVerse: Prompt 1)

Mexican cowboy tile, a stone-dry fountain,
a clock who doesn't know which way is down.
Cut-end tulips in a curvy glass vase,
red lips barely parted to reveal
starchy-yellow pollen

I hear it's beautiful in the summer,
but in high deserts, trees are few and short.
There are no fireflies but wildfires down the mountain,
no lightning bugs but storms on the horizon.

Indian paintbrushes-- dipped in fires of sand and sun--
scorch the canvas with brushbark bushes.
Concrete sundials grow cool
moss, which is why we use a pendulum clock.

Ticking until the tock
clang sends hands into a tailspin, counterspin
and suddenly, it's moving all backwards,
all widdershins, withershins, widderschynnes.
Spinning off-key and off-pivot like a missing fulcrum
until is lands-- splash-- into a backyard pond.

Soda bread and goulash
on days when snow smells like rain
and a bright yellow house on the corner
is the birth of a star:
no one dares look
away as it goes up in flames.

A Poem for a muse: compliments of NaPoVerse

Inspiration:
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Wallace Stevens, 1879 - 1955


Thirteen Ways of Looking at Hands

I
God held the pen in hand:
the tip grew dry.

II
In a mountain pass,
my hands felt the way north,
as if they could read the Braille of the stars.

III
It is Raining Beautiful for the last time.
The drops are hands that caress the roof,
creating sweet, percussive duets
With the birds.

IV
The hand
that wore
the wedding band was
the hand
that dealt
the blackened eye.

V
Her hands sat clasped on her lap,
encasing the smallest silence of them all.

VI
In the cold of the barren tundra,
his hands shiver,
creating a new kind of sign language,
appealing to whoever Up There
can interpret the gestures.
Over and over again he signs his pleas.
Over and over again, they are ignored
with another blast of snow.

VII
Swirling pads on his hands
mimic the motion of the wind,
graven into his fingertips.


VIII
Trees reach up with wooden hands
to hold the sky together in perspective.
Where they cannot reach, the sky is a disk,
flat, and unfathomable.

IX
When my hands breezed over
the black and white keys
they left a trail of music in their wake.

X
The veins in her hands
etched the outline
of a tree too precious
to cut down.

XI
It is wise to watch for the moon
on a stormy night.
It is wiser to hold it in your palm.
It is wisest to clasp it tight,
your hands folding around it
like a prayer.

XII
The churn is full.
Her hands are still.

XIII
The Immortal was dying,
as the sun rose at dusk.
I saw his hand reaching toward me,
crumbling, as it sailed,
into the leaves of an ash tree.

This is not for NaPoVerse. I do not know what this is. Do not ask me. I do not know.

joker is sitting in the window again,

pointing a thin, white finger at the passing townspeople,

"Her husband beats her, you know. That child is a burden to its mother. He should be locked away somewhere where he can't flap his ugly maw at anyone any more. she did a pagan frolic in a stream, her skirts pulled way up above her knees. that couple would shame even the devil with their cavorting. The children run from his house because they hear the stories. He kept his finger on the scale when measuring out grains. She isn't as virtuous as she pretends to be, and if only the preacher knew, tsk tsk."

But the thin white finger pointing out at the moonlit plaza, and the sharp white face in a perpetual sneer, and the black and red jester livery (more like deathery) just push me further into the corner near the fireplace, which is probably what it wants, after all.

And all this soot and ash is tarnishing the only nice dress I seem to have acquired in my many years of living-- or maybe it's just the filth dripping from the windowjester's mouth, rimmed by bloodred lips...

I worm my way out, trying to dodge the onslaught of who killed/lied to/was unfaithful to who. But joker's words are like a raincloud that just breaks over my head, rotten egg. Pine trees outback sway in his storm and whispering winds streaked with the pollution of too many secrets known. Too many sorrows weighing on people. But Joker seems as liked as his stormcloud and lightnings. I retch at the smell of it all and cough up a hairball of all of yesterday's rumors.

It splats on the floor, disgusting object it is, oozing through the cracks in the floorboards where I hate to imagine the mice are waiting with open mouths, with hopes that some sort of crumb of food will filter down to them. I gag again at the thought of the little gray rodents lapping up the oily filth like liquor, pink tongues quickly turning black at the soot.

I claw forward, splinters finding new places of (temporary) residence in my nail beds. Joker looks at me with a quizzical eye, dark, surrounded by painted-on shadows and midnight. Frowning, Joker stands up from his window perch, spindly legs creaking like the old rocking jair that was reduced to a pile of matchsticks by a quiet family of termites just last year. It's still sitting in the living room, a moth-bitten embroidery laying across it like a surrender flag. Joker stands, the whole world's eyes rising with him. Joker stands, rising taller than I ever knew he was, until the jinglebells bump comically against the ceiling. I continue to claw my way forward, but the floor is lengthening, green wood growing like it was still atatched to the tree. Joker takes a single perfect step, and its foot is upon me, holding all the air out of my lungs, crushing my spine with a series of pops that would make a mother rush to the nearest quack dentist. Joker stands, one foot on my back like it is claiming the merridian of time for his personal use and territory. The brownbootclad foot flattening my ribs into a single sheet of papyruspaper. And then a single perfect snowflake lands on m freckled nose, and I take in a single perfect breath, and the boot and the dress, and the soot, and the jinglebells, and the red and black deathery, and the mice, and the greenwood floorboard, and the white and narrow face with the reddened blod lips and the darkened shadow midnight eyes, and especially the long and narrow, pointing finger that points to my neighbors and friends, exposing their hiddensecrets to the world... disappear. And I am breathing in a field of poppies.

and it is snowing. pure white snow that defies the soot and grime that poured from the joker's lips of blood.

NaPoVerse Day 3
(taken from only two sources but still)

You buy Easter chocolates
for the pretty wrappers,
flattening them and pinning
them on a corkboard, as if
you were gilding it in gold foil
and dancing easter bunnies,
smiling flowers and chicks
with stick legs, buzzing
bees and zig-zag eggs.
But you eat like a bird--
like the magpie you are--
passing the chocolates on to me
until I am sick with sweetness
and sadness
as I watch your frame grow as thin
as the flattened candy foil.

For NaPoUniverse day 4

Because I never learned the names of the fish

The smell of Marinescence is everywhere,
like it painted the walls of my living room.
And as I step out onto the crash of the living sea,
I whisper everything I never knew out into the waves.

The Ankylosed Bifurcatives swim between crashers of white flim
as they trawl up for another glap at the fineous atmosphere
The tokays circling above calling out bilabial fricatives as they swarm.
Caeruleans meet for somber ciclades in the bycatch.
I laugh when I see the swarligig klapt between the edges
of a snalstream and a benthic strom.

I can't imagine a more beautiful sunset then when it sets all aflame
the sands with their buckler carbuncles, cilliated with fondlers,
and corroded in their aplombed frenzy.
I cry when I see the bones left behind by the assimilated mortuous.
I count the ribs and the corselets left behind, making a wish on every
mother-of-pearl, imbricated scale, scattering them to the wind.
The zephyrous breeze takes them where it will, but I, however am left,
feet trunkated in the siliceous strands.

I trudge back to my marinescent house
where the sharpfish and the jawfish hang on my wall,
hued in tones of opalesce and luminesce
in the moon glade of the night's silver scene.

For NaPoUniverse Day Five

You just couldn't wait for the annealing process to complete, could you?
And you had to use that overused gasket too, to rub it all in.
It's emmissivity, I swear, surpassed the sun.
You always knew that I was high-transmission.
You thought that edging would work on it,
but you forgot that my heart isn't flat like all your precious sheet glass.

It never was opalescent. It was always straight transparent,
and even the butterflies knew what was going on inside my chest.

Now my heart has shattered, and it's all your fault.

You should have let it cooled properly. Annealing the right way.
You should have lessened the live load.
You should have lessened the dead load.
You should have primed it properly.
Now it's all shattered into cullet on the floor,
going to be swept up into the miles of cullet barrels you have in your factory.

Come, help me find the pieces!
Don't mind that your hands might get sliced.
It's not as bad as your internal organs being made of nothing more than sand,
a little gold maybe? And a lot of heat.
A lot of stress.

Piece together my cullet heart. You can reuse glass forever.
Don't make it float glass like last time. I need an interlayer.
I need to be monolithic.
Or maybe... Maybe this time you can whisper into it?
Roll it between your fingers?
Blown glass always looks pretty on the mantel.
Just don't forget to let it cool.


(This is my inner glass nerd shining through. Eek!)

NaPoUniverse day 6

the planet's face: say goodbye
your legs spasm, arch, triumphs
see the world, they scream, onward
pine trees bow, holding wisdom and glory

your palms: Grime and sweat congeal
Stardust hears your pleas but ignores them
Stay a while, they entreat, join us
you leave the moon's footprint

your nails: cedar splinters, maiming flesh
branches fold under your head while you sleep
sleep for now, they murmur, rest
the peak awaits in splendor

your fingertips: pinnacle grasping
the rocks cry in adoration
you made it, they cheer, you live
a smile as you do not descend