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Opaque Seas of TransienceHeidrich walked briskly down the open hall, his feet echoing sibilant metallic notes between the polished steel support beams. He wasn't in any particular hurry, though his quick pace said other wise. He figured it was the many years spent living in this bustling city, running to and fro in the almost oppressive crowds, every single person he had ever met always in some kind of urgent hurry. He mentally berated himself for missing this opportunity and slowed to an even walk. The appointment was still a good thirty minutes away, it made no sense to run. Heidrich was determined to glean a small portent of unhurried peace before he found himself
HubrisThe world is not a skeleton. It does not ache bone-deep with our atrocities, nor is it fragile and ready for the breaking. It knows nothing so human, except perhaps to forgive our pride. Let me explain:

Young, I am a bright star with small, pudgy hands for guiltless flower-crushing. Before even that, I am a wispy squall for food, unused to knowing anything but myself, and warmth, and hunger.

The concept of a hero is a natural progression from understanding speech. I am Me. I am the one all the stories talk about, born special, to whom both innocence and wisdom are possible. I am so great a part of my own self that I do not know it can be de
tetherhookedYou shift around me, bejeweled
with currency which cannot be
exchanged because detaching your eyes
would be like hollowing a lighthouse,
would be smashing a rare beacon
with stubby fingers and because

trading your mouth would be like
silencing shellsongs and symphonies
and the cinders of your sentences,
the embers of your exhales would
welcome ash where once was warmth

and because your callouses catch on
clothes too well and your shoulders
are the base of a sturdy cradle
and every time you blink, I wake up
and I am uncovered and I am new

and because you would have to
watch the demolition of your
features, the thieving
Morning - for Carl SandburgThe morning erupts
         on little cat feet
A flick of the tail
         a breath exhaled
              too fast at the end of a leap
and then

A paw,
    placed on lid's soft fan of lash
breath whirring, throaty, warm
         nose
            to
         nose

eyes still closed

Then          open

Thwack –
A stunning velvet attack
    innocent lids           unwarned
    warm sheets      no safe haven

The morning erupts
    on little cat feet.
SuspendedSuspended

I like the palms of your hands-
dry and static.  I like the palms
your mother planted in the front yard
when you were five.  They grew more
quickly, but you grew healthier- less green.

Good thing we planned this
exodus into the Dead Sea.  
Lucky we cannot help but to float.

Something from the sea, the land-
they were mockingbirds, weren’t they?

This cannot be healthy.  
How the hell did my mother manage
to sink here like a fish
after death?  She claims to have exhaled
hard, but my lungs will not compress
enough; I cannot let go

enough.  Let me tell you something-

We should grow gills,
individually,
de la bellei have been told that
my cheeks seem to slender
like the stars.

truth be told i

inhaled until my bones
bloomed through my skin
and i sunk;

licked my kisses chapped
'til they reddened
like the roses;

contracted so i'd esvaniss.

i had once hoped to find
it there, the beauty

but instead i
always found space.
Old hauntsNumb fingers fumble at coppers
and a dodgy purple lighter which is unfit for purpose.

Giant splodges of stars
as if God - in a frolic of youthful exuberance –
went wild with a paintbrush.

Granite delicately held by shape and contour alone.
Slotted together: a melee of ankles, hips, spontaneous larynx.

Careless hopes, dreams wide, menthol cigarettes.
Thoughts all quiet.
Girl in the War It did get easier, once I started to imagine things were moving fast, too fast to fathom, too fast to see the stars but only feel them intrinsically on my skin—little pinpricks, little bubbles of air to touch my cheeks or take my breath. Or, you know. The sort of rambling things I was letting myself think, so long as it kept me distracted and living.

The window was damp with me leaning against it, and in that position the teeth-rattling rumble of the ol' greyhound's engines was churning my stomach much the same way a headache had been thrashing behind my eyes for the past month. I rubbed my ragged sleeve into a patch of fogged glass a
SalemI.

the bright scarlet egg of dawn
nests in my head.

when it is time, it will crack my
skull like a shell
and be born.

II.

I have a witch's fingers and a
witch's eyes, rough pewter lenses
through which I see the world.

I have sabotaged their crops,
I have plagued their children,
I have eaten their livestock in the night
  (so they say)
and I hear the whispers in the streets.

they will be willing to kill
for their conviction, though
I am not willing to die for it.

III.

I am no longer human.
I've been branded
with an ugly mark
of fear and desperation,

one terse syllable that cuts
like a switch.

IV.

a thin reddish line
nowhere elseit rains hard enough

that i can finally sit quietly,
as if lighting candles.

maybe there is
nowhere else to be.

a cup of water trembles
on the table as if afraid,

kept too long
from the useful yearning of roots,
from the anonymous way rain falls.

i light one candle
then another,
quietly,
as if lighting candles.

the rain keeps pressing damp invisible flowers
against the window,
reminding me how long the near-dark lasts,

how the woods at the edge of the yard
never see,
but thirst enough to catch fire.

each candle moves like the rain,
each quieting life
from lives of their own.

in the half-light coming in,
i can pretend
One is the Loneliest NumberOptimus Prime wasn't sure why he had come here. The journey to "Dinobot Island" and Black's laboratory had an almost dream-like quality in his memory banks and he had only gotten here five cycles ago. He'd managed to avoid the Dinobots during his journey, thankfully - he didn't want to be bothered. But now he was here and wondering just what force had compelled him to make this expedition.

He stood motionless as he recalled the last time he had been here, some weeks ago. Blackarachnia had extorted him to fetch a component for Prometheus Black so he could experiment on her and the scientist had, of course, betrayed her. Optimus had acted with
The Thin HoursI.

Those of us here in this skeleton time,
this time of the year when the nights are thin
and dark, and dark with anxiety, peeling
as layers of an oyster shell, brittle and effaced
and somehow iridescent.
When the bell tolls out the time the sound is thin
and reaches into fractured air and softly
seeks the spaces between the atoms and
misses the vital Os and CO2s in a lasting,
failed pinball. The bell sound dies in
some space between midnight and thereafter,
and each tock tock of slipping cogs is
a repeat and not a moving on.
The air is filled with each dull sound,
each tock a repeat and a repeat again. And the
slip betwee
intrinsic, you go unnamedthe memory of your laugh is an oral tradition
and I cannot release
the dust off my lungs
that you stirred from among long nights
and solemn books.
a philosophical question, innately unanswerable
  and just as beautiful, you are
the denouement, fractal and convoluted;
like the Arabian nights
we were once. but you moved on,
  personae, boundless
In summer we all burnThe summer is coming,
I hear the beach roaring from here,
can see shirts hung over shoulders,
sunglasses, arms round waists,
can feel the earth's purrs,
breaking hibernation,
pollens tossed up at us in fanfare.

Ants are walking over me
because we're sharing a tree together.
Back to back, we're trying to
make our winter's pallour a warmer shade.
Is it some sort of personal sign
when you let your shoe-tongues fill with tan bark,
when it's driven you mad your whole life?
Or when you eat ice-cream in public (the sticky
fingers a mere afterthought)?

These trees though, they're not changing.
I can't help thinking they
avalanche.The Ogre rises up among its brother and sister peaks, the Monk and the Virgin, a craggy limestone buttress looming above most of the north-eastern part of the Bernese Alps.

The Eiger: 13,042 feet of sheer rock, cracks and treacherous ice-fields.

Many attempts to scale this uncompromising weather-battered mountain have been made over the years, but successful attempts didn't begin until 1938, with the brave perseverance of a team of four German climbers. As a twenty-year-old eager climber myself, I knew all the facts. The windswept North Face (Nordwand) was the height of all climbing careers when I'd been growing up. 1952 - the great year of
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More from ~NukpanaNamid

SeptemberThin and nervous, at first glance you would hesitate to name her beauty.
She lacks the excess of August and the calm, pale strength of December.
She is subtle, and wears her hair in a tight, sensible bun.
Her skin is fair, and lightly freckled;
a good indication that she does not tan well.

It is her eyes that betray her.
They change like leaf patterns on the forest floor:
Now muddy brown, now vibrant green, now yellow and red,
holding you like an insect trapped in amber.
Her eyes tell you that she is beautiful,
perhaps the most beautiful of all the months.

She makes you fall in love slowly,
never quite revealing herself,
Summer SistersDo you remember those fae days
when we wore our hair out long
like wild horses'
and galloped loosely across the lawn
the palms of our bare feet
pressed against the sun-warmed soil?

Oh how I long for one last taste
of that honeysuckle freedom
when we could be dragons, or knights or
princesses
when each acorn cap was a bowl
overflowing with the sweet wine of Seelie Court.

I loved those pagan nights
when the lake licked
at the edges of the riprap
and we were witches
worshiping Mother Moon and the Great Bear
our faces rubbing the sky,
our noses filled with the scent of pine.

During those changeling hours
the Otherworld
sim
MetalworkingI know
I have little to offer
in the way of words.

Youth still dangles
about my neck
declaring:

This one has not yet loved.
This one has not yet hated.
This one knows only a few
of many things.

But still,
I burn with
the heat of my knowing.

I know how winter sun
slices the air between the window
and the hardwood floor;
how the sparrow screams
as a falcon plucks him from the sky,
and how words mean less and less
the more you say them.

I've lived long enough to know
that useless things
are not somehow made
less important
by lack of use.

I am young, yet
I know I am nothing
more than
a mound of clay
twisted

Featured in Groups

:icondd-catalogue: :iconhammeredpoetry:
×

plain

:iconnukpananamid:

look

see how the brittle grass bends
as though bowing at the knee
and the wooden fencepost
with its halo of rusted iron
stands
still longing for the lost days
when it too
could move with the wind

surely our old gods slumber
in the womb of this land

where clouds ceaselessly tumble
toward a stark horizon
and the dirt roads
are sewn 
on an altar of earth

and there
in the distance
a brown sparrow
pauses
his tail feathers braced against
the bitter autumn frost
his mirrored eye flashing
with the steady hymn
of sorrow

5,565

142 29 53
:iconnukpananamid:

plainby ~NukpanaNamid

DescriptionDetailsShare
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I'm still not happy with word choice here... I keep changing and changing and changing little things, ah well. I can't be happy with everything.

Oh! I forgot to mention, this was for HammeredPoetry's [link] prompt #4 Etymoetry [link]

with my word being plain:

Meanings:
level country
open country
evident, obvious
clear
ill-favored, ugly
simple, sincere, ordinary
unadorned,
physically unattractive
not special

oh oh! You see what I did there? Snap.
©2011-2013 ~NukpanaNamid
Category: Literature / Poetry / Nature / Free Verse

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November 22, 2011
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Daily Deviation

Given 2011-11-30
plain by ~NukpanaNamid ( Featured by $wreckling )
love 3 3 joy 1 1 wow 1 1 mad 0 0 sad 0 0 fear 0 0 neutral 0 0
:iconi-am-a-bridgewalker:
*i-am-a-bridgewalker Dec 21, 2011  Student Writer
"and the dirt roads
are sewn
on an altar of earth"

love that part.

it's fantastic how much motion there is in this landscape, offset by the animate stillness of the bird. the displacement of the expected imagery really brings this piece to life.
Reply
:iconangie-pictures:
*Angie-Pictures Dec 9, 2011
Congratulations on the DD! :iconflowerheartplz:
Reply
:iconpixieplay:
!pixieplay Dec 3, 2011
Phenomenal. "surely our old gods slumber / in the womb of this land" and that fantastic ending are my favourite parts.
Reply
:iconkneeling-glory:
`Kneeling-Glory Nov 30, 2011  Hobbyist Writer
You did wonderful things with that prompt. Holy cow! :+fav:
Reply
:iconnukpananamid:
~NukpanaNamid Dec 2, 2011  Hobbyist Writer
Thanks! It was certainly a fun prompt. I work much better with a little direction.
Reply
:iconarchelyxs:
*archelyxs Nov 30, 2011
Very lovely, a well-deserved DD. :heart:
Reply
:iconnukpananamid:
Mood: Affection ~NukpanaNamid Dec 2, 2011  Hobbyist Writer
Awww, thank you for your kind words!
Reply
:iconspiritwolfsong:
~SpiritWolfSong Nov 30, 2011
i like how you made a poem with the description of the word in the poem :D
Reply
:iconnukpananamid:
~NukpanaNamid Dec 2, 2011  Hobbyist Writer
Haha yup, that was the point. Sort of a fun play on words. :D
Reply
:iconchesse41:
~chesse41 Nov 30, 2011
Nice job on your poem. Keep up the good work.
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