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Kelly Thompson is currently working on a memoir, the story of one woman's journey of single teenage motherhood and out of her family's fundamentalist cult. Persistence in the face of poverty, silence, and erasure ends in identity and power for the narrator and her descendants. Kelly's work has been published or anthologized in BOMB, LARB, VIDA Review, Guernica, Electric Literature, Entropy, Fatal Flaw, Oh Comely, The Rattling Wall, Dove Tales, The Rumpus, Proximity, The Writing Disorder, Witchcraft, Manifest Station, 49 Writers, Coachella Review, Lady Liberty Lit, and other literary journals. She is also the curator for the highly regarded 'Voices on Addiction' column at The Rumpus. Kelly lives in Denver, Colorado in the sunshine of the spirit. You can follow her on Twitter @stareenite.

Point of View

Point of View
and if you wanted to drown you could, but you don’t...~David Whyte

Friday, December 19, 2008

Pantoum

I ran across the definition of a pantoum the other day and decided to try my hand at one:

The World Wide Web Spreads Its Net

The new leader of the revolution is a poet,
He waves the baton before schools of fish,
Like Billy Collins, he makes poetry accessible,
He reads the manifesto, shaking his fist.

He waves the baton before schools of fish
Singing the revolution song of the zillions,
He reads the manifesto, shaking his fist,
The fish form schools of the conventional.

Singing the revolution song of the zillions,
A predator moves in the shadow, entranced.
The fish form schools of the conventional
Among the mirrored water, learning tricks.

A predator moves in the shadow, entranced.
The new leader of the revolution is a poet
Among the mirrored water, learning tricks,
Like Billy Collins, he makes poetry accessible.

Kelly O'Neal Thompson

Copywrite 2008. Please do not reprint without express permission of the author.
(starrynight3@mac.com)

Monday, December 15, 2008

A Meditation on Being


Think of the parallel universe, of the many selves, of the eternal now moment that offers up
an eternally new past, a possible future,
Think of yourself as you might exist ubiquitous or only microscopically - but both at once-the particle in the wave.
Decide.
Decide to exist wherever it feels best - don't get caught in the moment when there are so many to choose from.
Climb the board of alternate states of consciousness; ride the great One you are; talk to yourself magnanimously, happily, eternally, with pleasure.
Follow the breath as it moves, with everything, in and out in the ever-widening, ever-tightening circle.
Do not take it, but let it take you into the dance of being, into the dance of I/Thou
You, into the holy of holiest instant, simply
Breathe and exit the vehicle of time and its travails, the hundred thousand million billion stories.
They are all yours. So be them.

Kelly O'Neal Thompson

photograph by journeysendphotography.com
Copywrite 2008. Please do not reprint without express permission of the author.
(starrynight3@mac.com)