While the universe yawns, cracks its neck and reaches for a cup of coffee.

An interesting creative writing experiment for you today. I was recruited by Ian Wallace to participate in a group poem, with several other veterans of the Sheridan County Young Writers' Camp, which I attended throughout my high school years. My experiences at Writers' Camp were absolutely essential to my development as a writer, so I couldn't pass up an opportunity to contribute. We were each given a previous line of a poem, without being shown the lines that came before. We were then responsible for writing a line or two, and passing our lines to the next writer, again without revealing anything that came previously. It's sort of like that childhood "Telephone" game, only with weird experimental poetry. We went three rounds, so we each ended up writing about six lines of the poem. I found it interesting how I can recognize the individual styles of each writer, yet the poem itself seems to take on a coherent theme and voice of its own. See if you can determine what the theme of the poem ended up being, and maybe try to guess what lines I'm responsible for. Thanks and apologies to the other writers for posting their work on my blog. I think it came out rather nicely.


"While the universe yawns, cracks its neck and reaches for a cup of coffee."

by: Aaron Pierce, Lindee Warfield, Susan Wootton, Cameron Maris, Ian Wallace, and Emilene Ostlind


While the universe yawns, cracks its neck and reaches for a cup of coffee,

You look best dressed in my own obscurity,
My delusions cling to you like a nightshirt,
Never letting go their gentle grip.
Sweet, innocent breath on an unbathed neck
The pungent aroma of salty sweat and lilacs

Filling the room like a question everyone's thinking and nobody asks.
The unforgettable sound of Elephant Men and Elephant Women
With mirrors that lie and whisper 'buy, buy, buy.'
A gap in understanding, magnetic pull of the glass,
The memory stored but forgotten,
There was a tiny shard wrapped in your amber hair;
As I pulled it out, it delicately pricked my finger

Red like feeling
Appears grey to colorblind eye.
The meat of the issue, such food
As I am within another's eyes digested:
Passing through, transforming,
Becoming the crowd of myself.
Cells divide at the speed of bullets underwater,
Blending our pheromones, mixing our watercolors,

Motion hidden from the naked eye,
Yet the essence of all that is beautiful.