Mercy

Day 8: Go outside. Yeah, that's pretty much the whole prompt.

Dusk sets between the reflections in my window,
falling slowly, like we're both stoned

and drifting through a shared dream.
The pale skin of your leg sparks through,

a pearly moonscape, adrift without orbit,
though I'd give anything to be the harmony

that corrals your somnambulant tendencies.
I watch the spotlight spring on across the street

and with it rises my questions, deep wishes
you'll do most anything to make ring true.

But with distance fades the impact, a bulb
weakening as the fuse refuses to draw power,

refuses to make me more than a faint glimmer
you may have once seen in the corner of your eye.

I keep waiting for the harness to reattach, and ask
if you'd please keep me closer; please keep me lit.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Bon Iver & St. Vincent, Roslyn

Gray matters

Day 7: Write a poem based around one color.

Awake is a place beyond
the gray tips of my dead fingers,
behind the starry silhouettes
of her solemn gray eyes,
shimmering with something
just less than anticipation.

To the moon, Alice,
that lifeless gray sphere
blinking hopelessly

in the vacuum, a pulse
of slow, dark gray energy
ringing out like a singularity's
last call, violent, but clean.
A precision strike, straight
to the gray home of emotion.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Elzhi, Detroit State of Mind

Mountains out of anthills

Day 6: Write a poem about an animal.

There's something faintly military in the way the horns
     follow lightly in their footsteps, a dark residue of
     loss left to colonize the spaces they've made vacant,
     and only the sharp tones of the brass make it feel

     like this was once a home - not a proud one, perhaps -
     but to call it anything else would be an affront to those
     who built it, turned their spindly legs to earth movers
     and etched out a space in the dark, wild underground.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Mos Def, Pharoahe Monch & Nate Dogg, Oh No

Center field

Day 5: As it is Opening Day (sort of, even though they've already played regular season games), today's prompt is to write a poem inspired by baseball. I'll avoid puns as best I can.

The view from here is better.
Sure, you'd love to be
the big gun, scorching fastballs
past the helpless flutter
of opposing lumber,
but who can argue with scenery?
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Dilated Peoples, Kindness for Weakness