To Virginia Woolf

I would have met you at the water if I

were then without a daughter; I would have

held your hand–I’ve known you before.

I would have decided on the hour–on

instinctual impulse–when the lower

haze of swaying moods send me down.

I would have called you I bet,

and the moon would’ve been full and

I would’ve ran barefoot in my nightgown

to meet you at the edge.

We would’ve known, I think, not to speak

about blue darkness and moon shafts shifting

across pale dandelions between our toes.

But chemistry comes in capsules now, Virginia,

and I dare say it’s like breathing under water

in a beautiful menagerie of imagination

where thoughts come with a reign and scale–

for weight, not matter.

But sometimes, like those nights we’d dive,

I fear my words are pebbles,

I risk giving them meaning and shape

and find shame from their sudden emptiness,

I fear it’s left me

until I think of you–my shared reflection

in the water, you with so much more grace,

but I can only build you up as a writer

and a fighter

and I drop a little stone to wrinkle you away

and I see my face, blurry and rippled,

brilliant in the moon.

The Overthinking Person’s Drinking Game

Reblogged from Thought Catalog:

When you experience a vague sense of inequity or deprivation but don’t have a template for whether your expectations are fair, drink.

When you aren’t sure whether the lingering sensation that you aren’t liked enough is a rational response to unfair circumstances or is in fact symptomatic of your tendency to blame your environment for your own failure to self-actualize, drink.

Read more… 598 more words

I love this!

All You Have to Do

In this sleepy little town

down behind the milkweed

to the hidden trail

that winds through the pines

and then,

breaking

 

sun

 

just like that

 

and once the light

has teared your eyes

you see the sea below

like a memory

like a dream

like a dead sea

 

like when you were a little girl

it carries the same sounds–

lapping, splashing, trickling off

your fingertips;

 

it carries the time you thought

you discovered it

 

it carries a night long ago when

you opened your eyes beneath it,

alone in that dark

 

it carries a constant answer

to a question you have no words for

 

take me, you say,

take me to that dream.

 

You could go there, you could feel it

all you have to do is weep.

 

 

“Extreme Ways” Moby

Now I’ve never been a fan of Moby this song is brilliant.  Genius.  And it also happens to be the theme song to the Bourne movies I’m obsessed with.  Enjoy

lyrics:

Extreme ways are back again

extreme places I didn’t know

I broke everything new again

everything that I’d owned

I threw it out the window, came along

extreme ways I know move apart

The colors of my sea, perfect color me

extreme ways that help me out late at night

extreme places I had gone

but never seen any light

dirty basements, dirty noise

dirty places coming through

extreme worlds alone

did you ever like it then?

I would stand in line for this

there’s always room in life for this

oh baby

then it fell apart, it fell apart

oh baby, oh baby then it fell apart, it fell apart

like it always does, always does

extreme songs that told me

they helped me down every night

I didn’t have much to say

I didn’t get above the light

I closed my eyes and closed myself

and closed my world and never opened

up to anything

that could get me at all

I had to close down everything

I had to close down my mind

too many things to cover me

too much can make me blind

I’ve seen so much in so many places

so many heartaches, so many faces

so many dirty things

you couldn’t even believe

I would stand in line for this

It’s always good in life for this

oh baby, oh baby

Then it fell apart, it fell apart

oh baby oh baby

then it fell apart, it fell apart

like it always does, always does

 

Virginia Woolf's 'moments of being'

Reblogged from Draft No. 4:

• 
• 

The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but it is then that I am living most fully in the present.—“A Sketch of the Past”

Read more… 1,033 more words

"Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being" an excellent essay at an excellent blog!

Eh, Fuck It

another poem for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub, come join in the fun!

Eh, Fuck It

I wanna sit you down and talk

I wanna pull back the veil

get you outside your head

get you into the air

through a curtain I see you

sleeping through

another day, another you

yesterday you looked in the mirror

you jumped right in

A Yellow Tulip

Join in the fun over at dVerse Poet’s Pub, this was a very interesting, and as Brian Miller put it, “ethereal” experience.  Here’s mine, rough draft:

A YELLOW TULIP

The lights streams through me

that white light of winter

on this warm ledge I am like a small sun

my yellow head heavy, lolling

as they each pass

at first a lover, then a brother

a mother and sister, no father I notice,

one friend

a nurse, a doctor, chrome on wheels

The Very Thought of You

Poetry Prompt from dVerse Poets Pub “Poetics: InterActions.”  I chose to do Gretchen Leary’s music prompt.  Here goes.  (“The Very Thought of You by Billie Holiday, the first singer I fell in love with)

THE VERY THOUGHT OF YOU

The rain is pattering on the overhang

black coffee in the air

the smell of paint from

my little kitchen I just painted

Emma is asleep in her crib upstairs

as Lady Day dips and drones

and flattens the back of my throat

as we sing

…the very thought of you…

it is July in my prime

Buds in the Gutter

James M. Cole Photography at Etsy

(this poem comes from a Yeat’s quote given to me by Mosk, thanks again my friend! This is what I came up with.  also, join us poets over at Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub!

there’s an undercurrent

to this city

something about all the red lights

and in a crowded line

for welfare I want to be waiting

for something other than me

I walk my way

toward some kind of home

in this little city

where I get lost

along the avenues, I follow

their rhythm

everyone seems to know where they’re going

yet no one does

Bed of Winter

It’s quiet out here

in the snow

the morning sky still a heavy blue.

It’s peaceful here

right now

for a few moments.

I think of the screaming

I heard in my head last night,

it doesn’t scare me anymore.

Daddy’s Game

published in FRiGG Magazine, Issue 35 2012

DADDY’S GAME

I imagine you must’ve shut

yourself off somehow–the way

you’d eventually teach me to d0–

before you entered my room

like a king’s shadow.

I hear the scrape of your jeans

your hands hot and big like swings;

Difficult Degrees

published in Rose & Thorn Journal

How strong the wood is

how heavy the water

how fire burns you and saves you

how we can suffocate in space.

A leaf knows no direction and it cycles.  

How I slip across a plank of moods

how I gaze so far in my small mind

how I am not this sick body, but a cycle–a circle,

a painted sphere in orbit given to touch–to feel–magnitudes.

I know no direction. The dark, the light–two poles of a whole.

Balance: I pull you too far down and then too high,

but at such lengths

I wander beyond myself

examining the weight

the burning

the constancy

the continent

of such a life.

copyright@AmyJoSprague

Erica

Come join in and share poetry at dVerse Poetry Pub, it’s Open Link Night–and sorry dVerse readers, this is the poem I meant to link to.

(rough draft)

PhotosbyDeniece @ Etsy

I still picture you

as sun-kissed in rayon

skirting up the tree behind me

one of us must have led

but who knew

how I followed you

your independence a purple

gloss I mimicked

muddling my own insecurity

my need to belong

chasing and being chased

like the trains we’d jumped

that took us around

the outskirts of town

or the mornings before school

running through the milkweed

and thistles

to get to the shore

where we’d leave our

shoes in the sand and swim

in the green lake

underwater I’d open my eyes

and look at how the sun

beams streaked my legs

in the space of water

and you, not so far away,

suspended beneath the surface

I come up for air and

you have left, your emails

say places like Naples and Europe

and I sit in my chair

in the dead of winter

wondering how you did it

how you got to what we were after

without exploding

how you fell in love

with a writer on another beach

I’m

here

etching scars across the ice

Leave, first poem in awhile

Come share and read your poetry Open Link Night over at dVerse!

 

There’s a square patch of sun on the wall

another cigarette stubbed out

I can’t play Adele anymore

and Ali Farka won’t distract

it’s quiet in these rooms

 

smoke curls around the plant

from the candles I’ve just blown out

I don’t recall it all being so still

I don’t remember how you worded it–how

you’d found someone else

but all that you said, how it all fell outa your mouth,

and I take to and bite the wind

in this winter that eclipsed from that spring

I stare out into the sun

the window sweating

and the voices, the words, the songs, the rhythm of

everything about you

has stilled

and I press play to another acoustic guitar

strumming, plucking gently down the line

hoping again that this is a sign

that this is how it feels

when you start to recover

another wonderland poem

alice tells  me to grow older

she has one of those aged mirrors

with the nickel stains

sitting at her stone table

she combs her hair

how do you do?

 

but alice, I say, you’re not far from here

we’re not far from here

but I don’t recognize my face

through the nickel blotch

and she says come closer

you stupid girl

 

there is no way out

there is never a way out

this mirror, she says, is our window

 

Two Writing Prompts

Writing prompts/Writer’s Challenge from the online lit mag The Write Place at the Write Time

Prompt 1: An anniversary can be a time of celebrations or a time of solemn reflection.  Write a story in no more than five hundred words that describes your protagonist‘s feelings about the event being remembered and how it affected their life.  Use words “flashback”, anniversary, “recognition”, and “future”.

Prompt 2: Summer is always a special time, and is often characterized as a period of transition in a young person’s life.  Imagine a powerful coming-of-age experience for your protagonist, and in five hundred words or less, describe how this particular summer changed their life forever–for better or for worse.

  (Writing Prompt 2) “The Swimlot” for Mike

They’re almost there, pedaling as fast as they can into an unknown idea.  July is ending and the small town         buzzes with campers, RVs, coolers, boats.  The highway is the shortest way, they cut across in a flash of chrome and into the woods behind Frankie’s Pizza.

“I know its down here, Amos, I know it’s here somewhere,” Mike shouts back.  They’re eleven without permission.  This is about to be the peak of their childhood, knowing too well that it was time to grow up.  But there was something special between these two–the love of adventure.  They’d spent the summer climbing the city’s crumbling ore dock, fishing, biking to the lake to jump into the waves during storms, exploring ravines in the rain, and at night they’d draw and dream and watch The Goonies, thinking about how they could chase tornadoes together.

Up ahead they see the trees thin and then suddenly it’s just water.  The field immediately stops, held back by a four foot high cement wall that runs the expanse of the woods.  At the bottom of the wall there is a thin, wooden ledge to stand on, the water lapping it in the silence.

They don’t have to say anything.  They’re sure they discovered this.  This was it.  This is what they’d been searching for–a wild place to call their own.  They look at each other, reflecting back the same glint in their eyes, the explosive joy heaving their chests.  They say nothing, but give a knowing nod to each other.

“Let’s hold hands, on the count of three!”  Mike says. They don’t bother taking off their chucks or clothes, there’s no time.  It must happen now.

The water is a cold aqua, with sun beams striking through into the deep.

She holds her best friend’s hand.

He counts “one….two….THREE!”

That second, that split second in mid-air, before their futures were riddled with scars both inside and out,  they were free.  Untouchable.  Beautiful.

Related articles

• The Humming (ptsdcreativewriting.wordpress.com)
• For All of You Struggling Out There (ptsdcreativewriting.wordpress.com)
• Scatter (ptsdcreativewriting.wordpress.com)
• Create A Compelling Protagonist (gointothestory.blcklst.com)
• Dissociative Sleeping (crazyinthecoconut.co.uk)
• Adventures in Writing, Part 1 (nadineatomlinson.wordpress.com)

DEGREES

I

I am surrounded in color

the yellow haze, the wet purple

of lilacs, the orange chains

of rust and motor oil.

Here, I am space ready for filling.

II.

I am surrounded in weight

weight that pushes and hides

and blindfolds me in curtains

of blood and faceless entrance.

I am a void being filled with dirt,

a heavy shovel, a man’s sweaty hands;

he fills me.

Here, I forget the the weight for years.

III.

I am surrounded in cold;

after the music, there is a numbing

that spreads like ink;

a chill that never disperses

as I come undone in the mirror.

Here, my brain fills with lesions.

IV.

I am surrounded in heat and noise

I am surrounded in voices

calling my name, whispering to me.

I am surrounded by godless stars

where the vacuum of space fills my heart,

embedding tracks of memories

across my chest,  intersecting my veins.

Here, I am white noise, breaking.

Here I am angry.  So angry.

Here, alone in my room I whisper

Be Brave, Resist, Fight

 

I touched the first sparks of a wild fire

before I learned the truth of pain.

Here, now,

I’m learning to fill within the wound.

Spoken

what might they have said
two silhouettes standing
in the snow
beneath the bare moon
the farmhouse chimney
puffing smoke as still as clouds
maybe
the children are asleep
maybe
where’s the grocery money
maybe
how could you drink it away
maybe
he never says anything
back
he forgot the Christmas tree
a case is in the backseat
where I was created
his head, always toward the ground,
his shoulders defeated
what might they have said
beneath the cold moon
maybe
I love you
but I don’t see how

Alone

I hate how you’re always

in my way

bent over in the hallway

as I carry all the laundry

I hate how you’re always

in my way

legs splayed across the bed

sound asleep as I twist

I hate how you’re always

in my way

like when I dance

you get too close

I hate how you’re always

in my way

leaning for a kiss

when I’m trying to write

I hate how you’re always

right

I hate that you’re gone

I hate that I never leaned in,

I hate how I never make room

The Humming

come join in the fun at dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night!

there is a humming

I hear

like an African choir

like the early delta blues

I heard it before

in the mirage of July

when I was eleven without permission

discovering the earth

in my PF Flyers

and rusty schwinn, speakers

from my portable radio wrapped

around the handle bars,

American Pie static in the air,

finding the swimhole no one

had discovered I thought

the humming then–a promise

of my future

of adventure

of a brave life

in love with the world

in my teeth

it drones to me at night now

when I can’t sleep

anxious beneath the stars

my smoke breathing

into the black

wake up! wake up!

sing, girl, sing

Scatter

for my father

 

Your body isn’t on this earth

like the others

I still see them, hunched over

bar stools at eleven a.m.

Your body isn’t on this earth

and I wonder where you drifted?

to an embankment

of some kind

to a bed of moss

a nest?

our rose petals we’d sent after

your ashes rotten years ago

your body isn’t on this earth

you’re more like a breath

or a petal, just above the stir

scattering

if I could talk you into

piecing back together

for an afternoon

I would touch

your face,

sober and clear,

I wouldn’t be afraid

I wouldn’t ask you why

I’d memorize your eye color

and the way your lashes swept,

I’d trace the bones we’d burned

I’d say my name for you;

I wouldn’t turn you in for all you were

I’d tell you who you were and are to me,

letting you go

and watch you scatter

softly back across the river

like a breath telling you I’ll see you again.

Great News

I’m excited, four of my poems have been accepted for publication over at The Writing Disorder.  EB-125, The Red Cape, To Virginia, and Borders.  I’ll be removing them from my blog and let you know when they’re up at The Writing Disorder!

My Little Writer

My little writer.  We just got this old typewriter at a garage sale.  Stars in her eyes! She loves to write, that’s all she does.  She loves poetry and writing her own, poetry books from the library.  We’ve started our own book she titled “Ones A Pana Time”      Makes me proud!

Only

if I had only known how it felt to be young

if I had only known the warmth in your touch

if I had only known how it all would end

and where I would have to begin, again

if I had only known hearts were so fragile

if I had only lived outside of hurt

and where I would have to end

if I had only known how it felt to be young

if I could’ve had one more year with you

would it be different now

if I had only known your time out here was done

now how I’d love you

nothing prepared me for being yours

I hold fast to the photographs, the memory

of your laugh, your scent, your gentle hands

lifting me to the sky

if I had only been old enough than to tell you

you could have me, keep me

but things happen for a reason

I have to believe that,

your memory makes me stronger—it

tells me I was wanted

if I had only known how it would’ve felt

to always be yours,

there was no saving you

but I could have loved you

why were we not given the chance

if I had only known you how lost you were

if I had only loved your tender heart

I let your ghost hold me on nights I can’t take

I let your voice drown out the others

and you hush me to sleep

you’re strong in your girls’ hearts

don’t you know

do you know that

you’re in us, we miss you

without you we learned how to live by

necessity, we learned sometimes love doesn’t

come in time

and then it gets too late

for weathered hearts

70′s Soundtrack

you’re leaving again

I’m standing in the dusty road

of a seventy’s film, watching your

el camino spray gravel at my chucks

your cigarette flicked out the window,

your wedding ring gone.  again.

not that I miss you.

but i wonder why it was so much easier

losing fathers than a mother

The Guess Who blares out your window

your eyes never look up from the road

because you’re angry

only and always angry

and I just happen to be there, every time

I walk the opposite direction in a cast of

browns and yellows

a 7/11 the only thing in sight

CCR plays as if it were a film

As long as I can see the light….

gone….gone…gone…

I tell myself to put my head up,

to raise myself

again

and I am my own mother

loving the girl I am

the woman I’ve tried to become

dreaming my dead father loves me

up in the sky in his plaid shirt

and dirty bell bottoms.

I walk til the end of the scene,

telling myself some people

aren’t worth keeping

Void

It’s open link night 40 over at dVerse Poets! Here’s my poem:

 

there is always the need to fill,

running away from the moment

and into, into what?

but a space I can fill where I don’t belong

where no one belongs

because it isn’t quite real

and I need I need I need

those pills, those smokes,

those songs, those words

what are the words where are they I

can’t seem to write

the first chapter, I’m in media res

so why write what has no final chapter?

there are the unanswered questions, those

moments shining with purpose

and meaning and no conclusion

like ourselves, shining out there

body heavy, mind light

my hands are empty, why

are they still empty?

it’s been three years since

the post-traumatic diagnosis

they weren’t kidding when they said chronic

I’ve moved in two spaces, one at the pace

of glaciers melting and murdering, and one

in sound waves only I hear, the buzz of the bee

outside my window, where I watch his fat belly

hum and sway near the bud, thinking

to myself how lovely the simple things,

how I’ve learned grace.

and then the knife divides the states and

I am but another chaser of

of

what?

what can possibly fill me?

Roethke’s Chaos

writing prompt for dVerse Poets tonight, “Tripping the Cosmos“

God had no play in the universe,

we are mere accidents of stardust,

the death of a self is shown such things.

Minds capable someday of seeing

beyond a beginning, a bang, an apocalypse.

Listen to the heavy spheres rotate,

the axis spindle constant, the theory

strings twining

space an airless nothingness

                  dark, dark my light, and darker my desire

our flash of lifetime as dear to God as the star from which we came from

as rudimentary as the vacuums  out there

Red Cape

When I was five

I used to jump from the top of the stairs

to the landing with a red cape,

believing if I kept trying

I’d fly

I’d be Super-girl

saving the world from damage.

Many afternoons, my bare feet

thudded the catchy carpet

as smoke rose up the stairs

with the patience of a coming storm,

my father puffing a pipe,

his big knuckles unharmed

from their crack into my cheek;

his eyes empty of what he’d done

beneath my cape.

It didn’t matter that there was no such thing

as heroes.

At least I could fly.

EB-125

It’s another great round of Open-Link Night over at dVerse Poets, check it out! Here’s my contribution:

EB-125

I think I’m seeing white birds

white birds scattering away

from my window, out there

in the cold January, their wings

sound, from here, like sheets–

my grandmother’s white sheets–

on the line in June.

The light coming in is white.

Color?  Or space?

Like the space we can never fill.

Like the start of a narrative.

Like the blank walls,

these hospital rooms cemented

in their smoggy halo.

I’m crouched over a puce tray,

surrounded by the others in halogens, others

that have found strange caverns to fill in

Vapor

this body’s breath

caught sharp and held

I hold it and like water

it escapes my fingers and spills

over my toes

when I am thirsty

asking too much from my body

when I am not enough

I give it tea and fruit and poisons

I exhale the fumes of the vices

herbal or smoky and fine

licking at these wet fingers

that let a pen scratch

let a word be plucked

from a curl of steam

this body’s breath

will learn it can’t hold what is borrowed

and maybe then stop

cupping and drinking

hold and take nothing

it’s enough just to breathe

let the vices unthread from the seams

of the spine into origami wings

taking flight in paper vees

and leave me in the water

enough

copyrightAmyJoSprague2011

first published in Psychic Meatloaf, Issue One