There was a time when the crowd hushed, when all of our eyes watched the ball flung into motion
with such beautiful flight, its shape slightly wobbled in the air flow imbalance of impossibility
It's that breath before that I remember the most, the beauty of the possibility of perfect reception,
and not the drop, when the world stopped, and the magic of the moment, broken open
for #openwrite
What is hope
but a rope for which to climb
a chance to take our time
a moment in which we find
something within us that brings us together
for #openwrite and #clmooc
The shelves have become barren of those silly cards, those throw-away phrases that always tried so hard to make us laugh, in aisles of the grocery store and boutique shops and kiosks in the mall, manufactured thanks spit out by cold machines, while I'm still one of those few who settles down in the quiet, pen in hand, to carve out poems from the bones of memory, a crinkled paper-cut of words tucked into the folds of your jacket pocket
for #openwrite
There's no longer time for 13 ways of looking at anything anymore, so let that blackbird fly free and kick the stone back to soil, and maybe put this poem down and get out there to work the world into a place where we can spend our days looking at it all over again in 13 ways, or more
There was never anything so delicate as the frosting on the cake my mother used to make — hand-whipping the cream in the big metal bowl, the sound of the kitchen tools banging out a birthday song, us watching from the edge of the door opening, hoping for an invitation to taste before anything went to waste
for #openwrite
Tossing the Magic 9 Ball into Poem
We're never quite happy with the word, this slow rolling spontaneity of motion that makes it so hard for us to be heard out here in the noise of electronic ether, digital space where every post is hummingbird, and letters, treasures lost from thought, so that meaning becomes strange and absurd as like stragglers returning starfish to ocean, we poets release these poems, obscured
for #openwrite
Three Poems for Three Lost Days of #OpenWrite
3. How easy has it been for you to turn your head from two hundred thousand dead, and instead, push full steam ahead with your lies?
(Theme: The News)
2. You'd think I'd know what to write when I sit down to write but that isn't nearly ever the case - All I know is that the space before me should be filled with something, and so here I go again, wondering how I found my way to the end.
(Theme: Ego and Homage)
1. It's doubt that I remember the most, the way he huddled in the corner with such silent clenched fury at his own family, but took it out on me, his classroom teacher, and how every single second seemed to last forever in the shadow of his anguish and my own worry about what it is I needed to do and how to get it done.
(theme: Decisions)
All praise to the shortened pencil, the powerless point with which to write, scratching small poems and stories, essays and plays, sticking words on white
All praise to the worn eraser, telling time of thoughts, such lost angles and false prophets of ideas, shifting compass of directions; reconvene, writer, when lost
All praise to the empty page, playground of the possible, and pause before its wonder, for where nothing was now something is, move the rock to find what's under
for #openwrite
It's not too much, unions demand, to review options in the plan, even if we don't understand the twist turns of this fragile land
I am ready/ I'm not ready
of masking up, of space between, of anxious teachers, broken dreams, of quiet fret; we're not machines; the unknown becoming routine
I am ready/ I'm not ready
for #openwrite
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Pareidolia
Power switch conductor brings me 'round, I'm awake again, midnight listening in surround sound
to music from the window fan, such noise in the soft signal of deep summer, around sound
like faint music, and if this were the wire, the Net, the stream, the dream, what found sound
would you be, in the night, with me as my mind's making melody, unbound sound
for #openwrite