Spotlight Poetry
Spotlight Poetry Collaboration Project
As Notes From Pluto grows as a gallery of poetry, fiction, photography and art, it is important to continue to connect with external inspiration. The @notesfrompluto instagram page has been doing collaborative poems by posting a question poll on the personal story that asks for five inspiring or resonating words from followers. Those five words are then orchestrated into a poem using both the inspiration from the follower as well as an individual take on it. The poems are then posted and tagged with the followers that contributed five words, as well as what those words were. This project helps Notes From Pluto connect with different minds as well as pay homage to the inspiration that constantly lays around us, but more importantly, within us, and how we can share this magic together.
Golden Lining
@chrismurphy
WORDS: bandana, latte, sherpa, dollar signs, silver
He was a silver lining that favored gold,
You ever meet a diamond that wished to be a heart?
Buried and under pressure,
Better dead than alive,
Just for the sake of sitting on a ring finger,
It feels your blood pulsing in its 24k grip,
Wishing it could pulse the same,
Wishing it could stay caved
A Brooklyn boy in a basement apartment,
Under that same pressure,
Though ‘better dead than alive’ sounded like a tempting promise,
An advertisement
New York City is a mother of many beasts,
Many diamonds that see light too soon to realize they never had to suffer to shine,
Concrete, dollar signs, and lattes,
Corner to corner we go,
This beehive with big lights and bigger dreams,
So many of us,
We forget were the queen
He saw the light soon again,
Arose from an echo inside himself to finally hear the beeping,
The honking,
The alarm clock
A day never promised you’d see it,
It just promised it would come.
Except for this time,
You did, too
Arising now,
You realize diamonds are more than plasma and carbon and pressure,
But atoms and earth,
Blood and flow,
A body connected to that ring finger
You start to promise day,
That you will come too,
The breeze feels like a lost lover,
Caressing your skin under your sherpa and lucky bandana,
You realize you are alive
You realize you kept a promise to live,
Except for this time, you didn’t have to suffer,
You just pulsed like a heart,
A heart made of gold
BABY, YOU’RE GREEN!
@torrestial
WORDS: heaven, warm, open, green, sleep
Heaven called me yesterday and said:
“Baby, you’re green!
I never intended for you to look like a green bean,
I made you with blood and bone and skin,
With warmth and structure,
Arms and legs,
But baby,
You’re green!
Your ancestors must be trees,
Saying darling forget your hunger and salvage your own nourishment,
You are the fruit of your own labor,
You are a garden
Maybe not of Eden but of something growing tall,
Toward the sky.
People often ask if a forest makes any sound when no one is there to hear it,
I feel this same way when you sleep!
I hear your heart open like a seed in spring,
I hear the melodies your heart muffles over sirens and they’re all so beautiful,
They are a hymn God must have missed.
Baby, you’re green,
I’ve been listening to the forests,
The ones with only trees,
No ears,
And they’re so loud,
And they’re so proud,
And they talk about you”
Persephone
@al_palz_
WORDS: divine, warrior, flourishing, survivor, courageous
An ode to spring,
And the silent martyrs.
Winter dies its slow death,
Choking rain with a frozen grip,
Blanketing the world in a deathless white,
A reminder that to be covered does not mean to be warm,
And to be in white doesn’t meant your feet await an aisle,
To be dressed in white can mean to suffer
To be dressed in white can mean to die
Spring plays this game with winter,
She silences the cold,
Like a stubborn brother,
Courageously melting its destruction,
Into a saturated garden,
In the front yard and in the bloodstream.
Both survived the cold,
Both survived the dark
They play tag around the world,
Gaining momentum with its constant rotation,
They chase each other until they realize they haven’t moved,
That they are in the same place,
And that the faster they run the farther they get from accepting where they are,
That snow is inevitable,
And so is its death,
The death of the white and blanketed,
The birth of the flourishing and divine
Spring and her maternal glow,
Summer in her belly,
Winter, buried in her past,
Starts to run toward her again from the other side of the earth,
Expecting a different result next March,
Expecting her to die for good.
She spreads through the dew,
A lullaby to the dead,
A eulogy to the blanket,
Summer sits in her womb,
The daughter of a warrior of the dark,
A survivor of the night
And the mother of something new,
Something warm.
Until November stretches out her hand,
Like a wolf masked as a sheep,
And winter comes running back,
To the same place they began
We Can Scream
@eriannabell
WORDS: loud, bold, optimism, action, energy
A poem written by molars;
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHH”
We are the backbone of the invisible,
Of a knife that has no blade,
A knife that punctures you inside of yourself before ever breaking the skin,
Of meeting the red and saturated,
The loudest goodbye.
No,
We write poems you’ve never heard,
That live quietly on the tip of your tongue,
It’s your job to do something about it,
Not our job to break them down,
Into little bits,
Words,
Crumbs of a prayer gods been waiting to hear from you.
We can be loud,
Watch this,
“AHHHHHHHHHHHH”
We can ring your ears into deafness,
We can take action against the whole that hides us,
We can ache and make you scream,
We can ache and make you silent.
There’s not much optimism back here,
We are the leftovers,
The rejects,
The school bullies,
Your optimism can take a fucking hike,
Back here,
We have to scream to see light,
We have to beg it to reach us,
Your mouth is a mother to bitter, forgotten children,
One that has to exert all of its energy to open,
And acknowledge that were even back here,
Not just a forgotten part or moment,
But a motif in the background that you missed,
The line you read over and didn’t catch the answer,
The bold mistaken for the battered,
We’re back here,
And we can scream,
But we’ll wait until you can hear
i forget
@bricetheperson
WORDS: radiant, energy, project, elevation, liquid
The earth woke me,
5 A.M.,
Dawn,
a stanza short of a poem I wrote as a child
It was missing a word,
It was my name.
I am 3 feet above the ground,
Each foot of elevation is a story,
A battle cry,
A hymn.
I don’t move,
I simply project,
What is,
Never what was.
I replaced my skin with liquid,
So I could rummage through my ribcage more easily,
Like sticking my hand in a stream,
Where everything I wish to discover is beneath the floor,
It’s deeper than you think,
And it’s weird to think,
That everything I search for,
I can’t hold in my hands,
I can only feel it,
Underneath my liquid skin,
Where energy forms white caps in my blood,
Where lost things become radiant,
And you can even find them in that 5 A.M. blue,
People ask my name
And I forget
The Beginning
@18_jj
WORDS: marshmallow, pixie, warm, cocoa, heaven
Heaven has become more like a sister than a final destination,
I no longer see it as a place,
But inside of me.
I used to have cobwebs in ventricles of my heart,
And dust on the roof of my mouth that craved some truth to wipe it clean.
I've written a lot of poems about my insides being the walls of some fleshy, pink museum,
And how there are echoes in my ribs that are not my voice.
I've told these tales,
And they were the truth,
But i've come to a brighter place,
A warmer inner surrounding.
Making art out of ghosts with blood that still runs red has released me from their perpetual haunting,
But even when they left,
I noticed I missed chasing silhouettes,
And I didn’t realize what happened to me in their absence,
I found a door i always passed but the key was present and I was never there to find it,
All I had to do was stop,
All I had to do was be,
I found pixies where I thought a skeleton lived,
A spirit I thought only lived when i died,
And that assumption caused me to live like I already did,
I realized I am both dead and alive,
That life and death are only the beginning,
My joints no longer ache,
They trust the direction they carry me too,
I used to feel like I walked on pavement even when I was on grass,
But now I sink in,
Like a sloppy, charred marshmallow,
Absorbing into every present,
Every ground.
Every morning I dance to this story I’ve lived,
Of this non-linear evolution.
The world has come to life,
I breathe with it now,
Rather than in it,
And it all feels so familiar,
Like a home I’ve always lived in but never unpacked the boxes,
Well, they’re all empty now,
And I’ve made a fire out of their carcasses,
And burned them to the dirt until they looked like cocoa grains.
I’ve written poems about the graveyard,
I’ve written poems about the wilted,
But this isn’t something that died too soon,
But exactly when it was supposed to
Inside The Outsiders
@zerocentss
WORDS: strangers, clarity, equality, fulfillment, expression
I think we ironically find clarity in what we already know,
As if that's not all that we try to escape from and see a different face of.
There's something about strangers we don't talk enough about,
something about the fact that we all live here and don't live here the same,
That we all do it different and then swear we know the answers,
Or we all do it the same and beg for them.
There's not much fulfillment in thinking that all we know,
Or who we know,
Now,
Is all that we will ever know.
We buzz around in cities and suburbs and rolling hills that speak poetry,
All strangers to the outsider,
Strangers to somebody's repetitiveness,
Somebodies typical.
We all get up and brush our teeth in the morning and nobody talks about it,
The simple things we all do so differently,
I guess we can find some equality in that,
Our inevitable fate in being strangers that share something,
And how our big, big lives are just specks of dust in somebody's sky,
The same sky you live that big, big life under and within.
All of us strangers,
Flailing our bodies in expression of who we are and why we should care,
And how big all of our lives are,
And they are big,
And there's nothing strange about that
Echoes In The Canyon
@derekkissane
WORDS: compassion, spontaneity, baby blue, adventure, enlightenment
Mama called me “baby blue”,
She would stroke my hair like letting sea foam hover into the gaps of her fingers just to feel the temperature contrast her blood,
Letting the bubbles pop on her knuckles,
Gently kissing her battered hands that carried a heavy life.
She’d say “baby this is an adventure”,
Shed tap the freckles on my face,
Like leaving fingerprints at a crime you want to be connected to,
I think a part of her saw herself in me,
I think that was the crime.
I would lay my head in her lap,
It was interesting to intersect my mind on her legs,
The lengths they must’ve walked to create the neurons that allow me to ponder my love for her journey,
That allow me to feel the canyon of skin and bone under the base of my neck and think
‘They’d do it all again for me’
She’d say “compassion is a mother you’ll learn to love”,
& That sometimes pain feels like the warmest embrace and the hardest goodbye,
That sometimes you love the wound more than the bandage,
Because blood is easier to lay in than the courage to stand again,
And that spontaneity is what keeps us small,
It's what turns the adventure into a battle we were never suited to fight,
Never suited to mourn.
My head still lays in her lap,
I’d say,
“Mama, where do we find enlightenment?”,
She’d begin to tap my freckles,
And play with my sea foam hair,
And say,
“Right here”