Gas-lit Stars

Streaking air bubbles cast themselves towards air

Looking for escape

Pulling itself up through the bitter sweet 

Reaching the top

Reflecting onto glass like stars streaking through the universe

Circling rings

Planets

Stretching across universes and passing through Suns and systems and spiraling past comets

Answering questions that we know will never be answered

Answering questions that we won't even know to ask

And someday that streaking reflection might show itself

Might tell us what it learned

But until then

It'll reach the top

Bursting through that bitter sweet

And surfacing to rejoin it's likeness

Or enemies. 

11/2/2014

Riley Welch

#5

A shining blazing sun

Lights up the hot before evening but not afternoon

And cars with automatic lights 

Look out of place 

As they shine into already lit space

Blinding eyes by the sun and the streets

Looking into bright white LEDs 

And heat penetrates layers of jackets and the skin underneath lights up

Ablaze with sunlight

Beaming that hot almost evening but not afternoon. 

10/30/2014

Riley welch

Favorite Fridays

In the Back of Reality

BY: ALLEN GINSBERG

railroad yard in San Jose 
I wandered desolate 
in front of a tank factory 
and sat on a bench 
near the switchman's shack. 

A flower lay on the hay on 
the asphalt highway 
--the dread hay flower 
I thought--It had a 
brittle black stem and 
corolla of yellowish dirty 
spikes like Jesus' inchlong 
crown, and a soiled 
dry center cotton tuft 
like a used shaving brush 
that's been lying under 
the garage for a year. 

Yellow, yellow flower, and 
flower of industry, 
tough spiky ugly flower, 
flower nonetheless, 
with the form of the great yellow 
Rose in your brain! 
This is the flower of the World. 

Stationary Static

With symmetry comes illusions

Like circular wheels

Turning so fast

You think they're standing still

And the road is just pulling itself up to keep the car going at the speed the dial tells it 

And the people behind them

Get caught up in the bunched up mess of the worlds spin

Like a bunched up rug the grip of your shoe can't grab

Or a wrinkled table cloth pulled quickly enough to leave dishes in place

Like that car

Standing still at 75 miles per hour along the road. 

11/2/2014

Riley Welch

Word Search

I could drown in piled up words

Covering my head in a pit of jumbled letters

Humbling down my slang ridden speech

And punctuating every sentence I thought didn't need it.

I could drown in gags and suffocation 

Gasping an thrashing among serif 

And sans serif edges

Climbing up the edges of crisp Helvetia L's but I slip and topple into the dictionary sea underneath me

Trying to scream for help

But my tongue

Can't seem

To form

The words

10/23/2014

Riley Welch

DAYS

I feel I wander aimlessly
I don't know what is next

I don't know what day it is
They all get jumbled up

Weekdays have no curfews
And weekends, early starts

I swirl cursive letters, neatly on receipts
And scrawl out notes in class
Like there is no need to read

I cannot focus on the next, just vague dates in the future
Weeks and months are blending

Together, drifting further and further.
Until my schedule realigns.

10/27/2014
Riley Welch

Favorite Fridays

February

A Poem in Prose

BY: ANDREW WALKER

It was February. She held her mother’s hand as she walked along the frozen ground, feeling it slip but never falling. She crushed the frozen lake beneath her feet. She had always loved walking on ice. The way it cracked under her feet, painting murals in lines like the veins in the back of her hands. Hands held by her mother so she would not slip. She loved the way it sounded. The crunch. Like bones breaking at the press of a heel. She had always loved walking on ice.

It was February. She was taller now. Bigger. Mother didn’t need to hold her anymore. As she walked and stomped, the ice cracked and crunched. She could see the caged ghosts break free from their toothy prison and dance in front of her eyes. She could feel the ice break slowly at her toes painting murals. The air froze in her cheeks. It stung. A billion icy bees biting her face. It was February. It was a colder February. She took off her gloves and looked at her veins in the back of her hand. Blue, long, aged. Her fingers were long, pulsing icicles waiting for warmth. She pressed them against the mirrored ground. Mamma, she said. The white air around her was still, silent. A dirtied canvas, crumpled and creased, thrown aside. She had always loved walking on ice. Her mother holding her hand. Never letting go. But when the ice broke beneath her, there was no one to hold onto. When the ice broke beneath her, she did not scream. She did not call for help. She did not swim to the surface. As the water froze her lungs she could not scream. She could not call. She could not swim. But she cried. She cried for the ice. She cried for her mother.

She cried because it was February.