William Michaelian

Poems, Notes, and Drawings

Archive for April 2021

The Impossible Dream

I record dreams as truthfully and faithfully as I can. In terms of accuracy, how successful I am varies from one attempt to the next, fiction and memory overlapping as they do. The form also varies. Some are set down in straightforward prose; others as poems; not a few are drawings and are rendered without words at all. There are even times when I do not realize I am recording […]

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Imagine Your Mind

If this were framed, and hung in a quiet corner where it could be read each day, it might serve as a kind of household guardian spirit. It might serve even if it were not read. After all, poems have their ways. . Imagine Your Mind Imagine, your mind, wandering, until it imagines itself home, raindrops on a silver coach, clattering on stones, a sign nailed on with flowers, proprietor […]

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Lilacs and Apricots

Trust — surrender your control. It’s a fiction anyway. . Lilacs and Apricots The time in this kingdom between lilacs and apricots, when rainbows are bridges and nights are cool, when fate is as silent as the tombs are still, the throne is for children to ascend at will. Recently Banned Literature, May 19, 2014 . [ 1083 ]

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Tragedies and Toy Soldiers

We are the bird, the cloud, the drifting insect. We are the waterfall. We are delicate bits of dandelion fluff. We are all of space, and all that space contains. And we contain that space: space enters and leaves our bodies with every breath. Space is not only out there, where the stars are. It is here, where Earth is, and where we are. And we — you, I, and […]

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To the Wind

I used to hand her the wooden clothespins. I was too small to reach the line. And yet somehow, I could reach the sky. . To the Wind A poem of three taut lines, defined by his mother’s wash and her clean white sails Recently Banned Literature, April 16, 2014 . [ 1081 ]

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Up Through the Boot

Tiny blue flowers, dressed to forget what you were about to say (but never the first to look away) “Tiny Blue Flowers” Recently Banned Literature, May 28, 2015 . Up Through the Boot Up through the boot the grass finds its way Up on the knoll past the root of the tree Up to the shin and up to the knee sure as I lie here, waiting for thee And […]

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Every Bit a Dandelion

Bits and bits and odds and ends. I needn’t be, but I am. Sits and sits and nods and bends. As if is is was, and was is is. April 16, 2021 . Every Bit a Dandelion Now blissfully adrift, there is no question of weightlessness. Now working the laces on my worn out shoes, none of gravity. Now musing on the trials of the past, none of anxiety. Now […]

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In Another Life

In another life, he could be one of those beautiful moths with markings on its wings that look like faces. In this life, he’s content to be a constellation. Or so it seems between stars, where silence scours the universe and nothing is its own reward, where night is a ribbon in his loved one’s hair. Recently Banned Literature, April 22, 2010 In Another Life April 21, 2010 . [ […]

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