Wings 4 You - Challenge Response

Dame Carla Kurt, of my beloved, inspirational, and faithfully followed Anonnyrie blog, has started a NEW blog entitled Wings 4 You Coaching, in which she offers weekly creativity coaching prompts and discussions. I'm doing a Major Snoopy Dance with feverish delight - true story. Below is my response to one of her coaching prompts. For those who don't want to bounce between my blog and hers, the prompt suggests "starting a poem that uses metaphor to express your ideas." The prompts are bolded, below, with my responses following.

In my past, I was ... an inverted tornado, ingesting atmosphere & debris, & claiming it all, demolishing internal foundations with the gusts of misappropriated guilt.

In the mirror, I am ... a sunflower with feather-petals and word-seeds, and I do not droop but undulate through earth, grass, sea, air, and fire, on my fierce Siren's tail. My breasts are perfectly risen & tipped, and my uplifted blueberry chin cocks sassily. My smile flashes teeth of arced moonbeams.

OR

I'm a tired peach, bruised and too long in the shadows of a bustling, over-extended tree, nourishment to others but useless to myself, oh -- but still, but always, seeded.

In my dreams, I am ... a multilingual map of destinations & arrivals, speaking books, art, paint, & pens, and clothed in idea-inked canvas. My rivers are ridged green fluorishes; my mountains are desires, dares, risks taken & paths only going up, towards the moon, or out to the edges of seas glittering with friends, feasts, & fire-lit dances. I am the map and the traveler; the question & the answer(s); the discourse, the adventure, the quiet turning tides shifting internal continents. I inhale ticket stubs & exhale poems & pictures for those to come. I am accessible. I am uncomplicated. I am salted breezes, & I echo the running hoof-&-paw beats, the exalted howls, of the wild, the free. I encompass coasts & villages, plantings & harvests, seasons, flavors, spices, & tornadoes. I bloom consumed pelts; my shoes are wishes overlaying bones. I will hold your hand, Follower, & we shall laugh -- EVERYWHERE.

In my stories, I am ... the vowels forming shapes & visions from loose letters. And I am the journalist, one step (or more) behind, capturing it all so nothing is lost, especially nuance & dimension where imagination abandoned its place. I am the full moon eye illuminating possibility, the coccoon of wind collecting exhalations and reassembling their details to give flight to sparklers, fireflies, & monsoon lightning.

In my fears, I am ... veiled to the point of blindness, muzzled back from speech, & cloistered from any action or change. I'm a column of stone weathering to dust & blown into oblivion by chance & the lives of others. I am unable to distinguish music or language, & all books have fed some mad bonfire. I am actually a serpent, belly-down in the dust of my own erasure, coiling ruthlessly into dark, closed tunnels, alone with my shadows and bloated by my undigestable potential. In my fears, I am errant hail melting in hot sunrays, easily evaporated, surrendering to my short fall. I'm a declawed cat powerless to fight back. Or I'm a mermaid encased in a desert-themed snowglobe.

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What I TRULY love is that these are weekly prompts. In a week's time, I actually HAVE time to participate fully, privately, utterly. Lovely. Lovely. Still Snoopy Dancing, I am!

Journal Entry

Soul weary, I am. "Rote" is the parasite in my limbs, killing my spirit. That drive out to the desert with Chris, Cam, Ciera and Mom reminded me there are more expansive vistas. I crave them -- internally, especially. I read powerful books on creativity [not just art, but LIFE], then I sit on the patio and kvetch in my journal and sit staring off into the sky. Is something new gestating within? Or am I really lacking oxygen here in a stagnant pond? I am awaiting fruit from this dry barren place.