"When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am…" –Maya Angelou
You were in my dreams again
Inaccessible, as in life
Things are sharper now than they were then
And I’m the one who bore the knife
I saw you through the glass again
A distant shape, a distant voice
How are we supposed to win
When we lose so much by choice?
I remember all the little notes
He left around the ship;
The gentle love of which they spoke,
His most generous gift.
I remember all the little notes;
He wrote them all in rhyme,
And though he wrote no signature,
I knew the author every time.
I remember all his little notes,
And I remember still his name,
But he, I think, will never know
Why I truly came.
I remember all his little notes,
The ones he tucked away;
For I was sent to break his trust —
Instead, I ran away.
Six days out of seven
I wake not from my sleep
And of twelve months, I have eleven
Where time is easier not to keep.
We each are sleeping out our dream
Waiting for a waking scene
Hoping for a time to come
When we’re more than what we see or seem.
I cannot write the lyrics
Of the song I’ll never sing;
I like it so much better
When it is but a dream.
There’s a beautiful cacophony
In which I’ve hid myself too long;
An Edda which I love,
But to which I don’t belong.
It’s become my orchestra;
My wonderful distraction.
But I could never write a song
To brush the heights of my imagination.
I find it thrives much better
When it never leaves my mind;
So I will leave it there, pretending
That it’s something I will one day find.
I’ve heard people tell of chasing this thing.
Sometimes, I see it in my dreams;
It seems like such a lovely place to be —
But some will chase it endlessly.
They call it far, or call it near:
Miles, they never volunteer;
Time, they never dare to guess,
And some could swear that they regress.
But this thing they swear is their true home,
This place that they will never go,
Is the place that they already were
If they turn back once they’ve gone after.
We had come there for a purpose.
I tried hard not to be nervous;
But when he saw me and half-started,
My heart beat out of my chest.
He approached and kissed my hand;
Not at all what I had planned.
He was the captain of the ship;
And I, supposed to be a simple guest.
A spy was meant to blend in;
But, my companions saw a win,
And their eager nods to our captain’s invitation
Saw us that night around his dining table.
He spoke nearly to no other
And I so wished to run for cover,
For he was charming, and sweet,
And to consider harm from me, he seemed unable.
His name, he said, was Nikolai;
No other name he’d let me call him by.
And a fond familiarity with post-it note poetry
Grew over the course of the next few days.
The poems were left to me anonymous
But, they were really no less obvious
And I couldn’t help but blush and smile
Every time another came my way.
My companions, for their part
Wanted me to use his heart
And gain what we had come to get:
An edge for those we served — his enemies.
But I found that I no longer could
And so I did what I then always would,
And ran from cause and captain both:
Losing all to a choice I would not seize.
Drawn from a dream I once had, involving an interstellar civil war, an infatuated Russian spaceship captain (who left me little love poems on post-it notes, it was kind of adorable), and a choice that I refused to make — that last seeming to be a recurring character flaw of mine.
You say I should be wide awake;
But I tell you that I’m half asleep.
You never seem to realize
What it is I really mean.
My mind is in a daze;
My days pass in a haze.
My eyelids are a veil between
What’s behind them, and this place.
You insist that anything
More than eight hours is a luxury.
Who am I to disagree?
But it doesn’t mean a thing to me.
Days and nights are just the same;
In the gray they went and there they came.
And when the gray is all I’ve ever seen,
What’s that mean for my weary brain?
You tell me to get over it;
To go and drink some coffee.
But I feel as if I’m dreaming it…
And my eyelids grow so very heavy.
In space, no one can hear you scream:
I’ve got a head full of stars
In a pitch black dream;
The dark goes on forever
And I can’t do a thing
‘Cause in space, no one
Can hear you scream.
What do I see?
Today I see a sky;
With an inch of glass
And many miles
Between me and what I spy.
I wonder which makes me more distant:
The miles, or the glass?
The glass feels almost infinite;
The miles just a thought
When the first cannot be passed.
I wonder if I’ll ever touch it;
If I’ll ever feel the stars.
Does anybody look up,
And get to say,
“That’s ours”?
Or are we forever grounded
By the miles and the glass?
Lost to distance
And unwillingness
To ever risk a crash.
This week’s CW prompt:
“Look out the window and write a poem about the first thing you notice.”
Writer In Retrospect 