LYDIA~BLUE GIRL BLUE WORLD

Lydia, a homeschooler, has been writing poetry for about seven years. She finds inspiration everywhere in her daily life, travelling with her family, or just by the combination of a few words. In her first Slam Poetry competition, she placed second against several more experienced poets. You can read more of her work at bluegirlblueworld.wordpress.com.





-Back Woods-

Crackle-crackle snap!

I’m walking in the back

woods

ignore that initial rhyming,

come on here we start now;

The Grove:

a park of more than fifty acres

of your classic Illinois forest.

Sky,

when you get a peek

through a meshy messy tangle above

is blue-airbrushed cotton steel poofy plates,

all hand-dyed with cobalt,

blotchy darkness here and

pale angel-wing wisps

over there.

But don’t pay attention to the sky

the same way you ignored the rhyme.

In fact,

you don’t have time to think about

not-thinking because there’s definitely

something else screaming at your eyes.

The air clean, cold, and thin,

brrr-brrr of autumn--

yeah, autumn, and I think you know now what’s

grabbing your eye above dulling brown green ground

and nearly black trunks like carbon-coal sticks that they are

Burning fireworks!

Wait--

no, it’s not July Fourth,

it’s autumn, remember?

The trees are burning silent bang-flash gold squash-color,

a few-few apple-red,

smash-contrast with the dull dead wood and

dark swollen sky and the

quiet.

Stop walking and the

crackle of leaves that adds to the illusion of fire

stops, then you can

hear how quiet it is.

Squirrels the color of dark mercury

tinged grey, similar to the clouds above

dash about through the colorfull leves,

and only a few birds still flit and chirp,

those that haven’t gone south yet.

A hissing, whooshing, hollow stormy gust

rattling the trees that make it sound like a wraith

or the sea,

sending leaves spinning and soaring.

Crunch-crackle snap,

don’t shuffle the trees don’t like

their collages to be ruined.

And be quiet:

you’re the alien in this gold-gold world

that will ruin you if you don’t

behave.

Breathe that air that feels like knives,

smell the moist plants from yesterday’s rain

as you walk, shuffle-crack,

through the back

autumn-hippie-dyed

woods









-Leopard Shark-

Your sleek shape slices through the water,

gills opening and closing, slowly.

In a touch-tank, you swim,

olive-spotted golden skin,

leopard shark.

I slide my hand into the silken water,

feel it warm,

wait.

You swim towards it,

your muzzle touching my fingers:

my fingers, my most sensitive,

your nose, that’s yours,

and mine lightly touch

your smooth yet toothy skin.

You are something reptilian,

also something mammalian,

a creature that swims through

the water of my soul.

With a last swish of your tail,

you glide away from my hand.

Yet I can still feel your touch,

leopard shark.













-On Starry Night-



Tides of space,

eddying in the sky,

swirls and ripples among stars.

Below, the same motion,

trees rustling softly in night breezes,

the hills rolling too, like waves, the town a little boat in the swells that

curve into the distance.

Mirroring the above,

or perhaps reflecting in the above,

lights scattered through the town, still,

unlike the will-o-the wisps of the skies that

drift

among currents unseen,

carried downstream,

to the west

still winking.









-Starfire-

There was nothing.

Before I was

there was only dark matter and darkness,

nothing but dying light,

the pinpricks of it all there was to be found,

like snow frozen in mid-fall,

sequins on black fabric.

Then…

I was

I swirled and burst into being,

starfire roaring, the heart of me churning;

helium, hydrogen, traces of carbon,

tiny diamonds of it, true stardust, shed from stars,

all leftovers from fusion ended long ago,

fusions and fused protons with neutrons in the

cores of themselves,

fused the protons together to make

the star-snuffing bane of all stars:

iron.

Energy that all other elements could reflect

is devoured and absorbed by the cold, cold iron,

heart hungrier than the singularity in a black hole,

so hungry it sucks in energy and light,

yearning for heat to warm its frozen heart,

eating forever,

still cold like the 0 Kelvin of deepest space.

The star that

I

 am made of had died in that way,

shedding layers of precious used and unused elements into

vaporous free-falling clouds of unconnected atoms,

LEGOs from a massive superstructure scattered and not at all related.

But they are now joining with others to become something else;

One speck, slightly denser, grabbed another;

the pair yanked in a third,

and in this way

recycled body,

pieces of old dead stars

fused and rolled together,

to form something utterly new!

I am

white hot heat from that primary burst of energy,

ultraviolet, beta-waves, x-rays, more,

produced with the fury of a thousand atomic bombs,

born with such propulsion that

that light screams across the local clusters, the galaxy,

taking years but the fastest matter in the universe

propelled by I

and I alone,

it doesn’t care how long it takes or how far it is,

how fast it is going,

but slams into a far away planet,

searing but from so far away, blocked and diverted by

dark matter, nebula, curved by singularities,

so hotly streaking but so faint.

My

surface heaves and rolls,

I

spit curls of my plasma far off into space,

I

am the hottest thing in the universe,

made of the hottest form of matter,

and I

will one day burn to death like those of the atoms I stole,

the ones that are all of me now,

defeated by their own energy-making endeavors

that were the beating of their violently pulsing heart.

But I don’t care.

That one fatal moment when I fuse the wrong atoms together

to make the element Fe, iron,

when it saps all my strength and energy

I don’t care that it will happen,

because energy is matter,

 and I am both.

In dying I will live again,

more fire in another star’s belly;

right now

I am

the ferocious belly where other stars hide,

that starfire, churning, swirling,

the only thing that finds rest is the core of me.

Do you hear me?

Do you hear me from far away on your little planet

that is no more than a speck in the massiveness of me?

Do you hear me singing in starfire,

my starsong reverberating within my light?

No.

You will not hear me for yet a long time;

because my light sweeping across the universe

has yet to reach you.

But listen:

One night when the roar of your star’s song and

the din of its fusion has faded

and the moon that reflects and echoes its call is not on your side of the planet

and the ever-loud starsong has finally faded from the air…

Then stand,

in my brothers’ and sisters’ light,

feel it waver and pulse on your skin,

this light that has travelled so far,

relentlessly past its bane,

the black hole singularities,

and hear the awesome stalwart starsong

that they sing

together.

Listen to all of them,

keep your eyes and mind open,

and someday you’ll hear yourself

just what I hear every day.

You will hear the choir of heavenly voices,

a clamor spangled around your planet like guests at a birthday party

around the guest of honor.

The deep voices of massive red giants,

high, tinkling voices of dwarves and new stars,

rich tone of middle-aged stars like your own,

all in an orchestra of glorious song that never stops until

the end if the universe is here,

Hear them all!

Can you hear it, little human,

far away from them as you are,

through the silence of space and the noise that your kind makes to itself?

We are singing.

-A Review of a Dream-

It was dry,

literally a desert, no water.

First sight you might think that it’s intriguing,

the ruins of cities all about,

but don’t be deceived by the

pleasing cover of a forty-hundred-page novel or a bad joke

that takes you a long long way for

nothing.

No.

Don’t be deceived because this dream is a

hoax.

There is no action,

no unusual activities,

because this dream didn’t generate beings.

Someone forgot to code it in

while they coded what relied beings

to be interesting.

If you ever find yourself

standing on brazen bassy sand that bites at exposed skin

like a thousand hornets,

beneath a blood-red sky with the sun at dawn,

ruins and towers distant,

immediately break the dream like glass covering an alarm unless you

enjoy standing at a moment before dawn,

wind and sand tugging at you eagerly, pleading with you

to come,

to come somewhere else, where

there is more, things beyond the

render distance that will generate if you just

come

on.

This dream gets two stars,

the same as the number of jewels in

its sky , more than none because

 it’s a beautifully cosmetic dream

that if you rip of the control panel and begin to

code

a new

dream you will get something amazing,

because in the distance the wind itself knows that

there is something different and interesting.

Because there is an air of mystery…

and because there might be something else.

Reply with your own review

and let me know

if there actually is…