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OpenWrite

Scars show healing, too, knife lines tracing wounded worlds, places of exposure in which fingers brush up against the past, the skin always sharing stories, with jagged imperfections etched deep inside the heart

for #openwrite

Awake, when sleep departs, listening to rhythms of night, the landscape inscrutable but for some small melody still yet lingering: mere gossamer and translucence and then gone

for #openwrite

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

https://www.ethicalela.com/thanks/

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)

https://www.ethicalela.com/category/5-day/

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

https://www.ethicalela.com/july-openwrite-praise-poem/