#Stratus Clouds poetry

[superabundantdaydreams]

Choke on Your Tongue

Perhaps if you begged those made of gold up above, they'd cast away your silver tongue. Yearning for one so fleshy and feeble as theirs, oh what more than to be vulnerable? But one who is trapped in suffocation for so long will find the prospect of breathing again to be a horrifying one. Have you forgotten how to let go of it? No. You never did learn to breathe, did you? It was not allowed. It was demanded that you not. But others stare at you in their assumption that you know how to breathe, they cannot see your silver-coated tongue, preventing the air from reaching your throat. They do not see the gasping and wheezing that causes your head and your chest to endlessly ache. But if they all believe you're breathing, they'll never teach you how. You tried so desperately, but you realized you could not learn to take in air on your own.

Who will intubate you when you cannot do it yourself? Who will inspire you when you cannot declare your suffocating?

[ultrainfinitepit]

I got a few more suggestions, so here's all the ideas so far:

Circles of Hell: Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Wrath, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, Treachery

Planets in the Solar System: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto

Greek Muses: Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (lyric poetry), Euterpe (music), Melpomene (tragedy), Polyhymnia (hymns), Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy), Urania (astronomy)

Navaratna (Nine Gems in Hindu Astrology): Ruby, Pearl, Red Coral, Emerald, Yellow Sapphire, Diamond, Blue Sapphire, Hessonite, Cat's Eye

Types of Clouds: Cirrus, Cumulus, Stratus, Nimbus, Altocumulus, Altostratus, Cirrostratus, Cirrocumulus, Cumulonimbus

Norse Realms: Midgard, Alfheim, Asgard, Vanaheim, Niflheim, Muspelheim, Helheim, Svartalfheim, and Jotunheim

Thinking about revisiting my Angelic Hierarchy series. I want to make the designs smaller and simpler, and maybe themed after something. There are nine angel types in the hierarchy so they would have to be themed after something that comes in a set of nine.

If anyone has ideas, let me know in the replies :)) and/or vote in the poll.

[crater-lake]

22

4/5/23

Buildings disappear into the fog over New Brunswick. Poetry. Just beyond the train line, the Earth stops. It is alabaster ethereal, bone white mist subsuming the catenaries which stalk the tracks of the Northeast Corridor. I consider the quietest voices skating the tendrils of the wires to someone’s perfect ear over rush hour trains shrieking to bustling metropolises. I see stand still traffic herded before a red light. I interpret the antsy bouncing of a passenger’s leg, or their dry throat. Green light. The car park is concrete gray, a behemoth of concrete slices stalked until the stratus clouds. Fences and dark shadowy chambers of lots stratified loom over the tight one way streets. Deeper in the background sharp angles of construction stand motionless, as if about to transform into an industrial beast.

[teenagehandz]

if magic existed, we’d call it disease (for @7-weeks february poetry prompts day six: stratus clouds)

i’ve been thinking about the sky so much more lately

because i want to believe in magic

because i want magic to wipe away your search history and those words that aren’t quite stuck to you (yet)

because i want an explanation for why i cried over/under the stars last night

and i want the clouds to be the home this house is not

i want to sleep on stratus clouds

and spend my days with the sun

it’s not that this is fake

but it’s fool’s gold, it’s the smiles trying to drown out the fine print, it’s a mountain where there should be a valley, it’s

none of my business, really

i’ll just wait for the rain to come and wash this/take me/carry us away

[postofficeplanet]

F.S.R.

In the official guidebook this is known as F.S.R. ~アナタノタメニ~/F.S.R. ~For Your Sake~, the album "water ~for relaxing time~" (2001) lists as F.S.R.

Composition: Torn (Masafumi Takada, Shingo Yasumoto)

Lyrics: SUDA51

Performer: Yoshimi Kakinuma

Although uncredited, Masaki Tsujino does the poetry reading per the credits on this subtitled video (Chinese only). I included them in a separate post.

In a winding road, looking for something lost

Returning haze

The large vessel is too much to hold

Even so, the contradiction screams

Please, (flowers) overflow

Please, (sun) burn up

Please, (rain) dance

Please

(＊Chorus)

Sweetly fleeting, morning

Is when sighs hide away

Cure the dyed red, morning

Is when the garden of tears is locked

Please

Blossoming blue flowers

The illuminated day

Flows to the sky

The scenery I saw is close

A faint color

That light, if it will guide

Quietly nod your head and smile

Please (flowers), whisper

Please (sun), dry up

Please (rain), be delivered

Sweetly fleeting, morning

Will scorch and burn the flower petals

Cure the dyed red, Morning  

Is when dreams awaken and time turns

Deep stratus clouds, morning

Will erase the scars and pain

Awaken to a sweetly fleeting morning

To your heart

Please

Blossoming blue flowers

The illuminated day

Flows to the sky

(＊) Repeat

Please, fleetingly

Please, tears

Please, to you

Please…

[persephoneshellhounds]

i. you are skies away and from afar, i would watch how you graced the horizon with scarlets and pinks. I try to put to words how magical you looked but the paper remained white like your stratus clouds. and so, i go back to basking in the colors you have to offer, to gazing longingly from a distance, to watching you from afar; a little sad, that i'll never get to touch you, a little glad, that i'll never get to lose you.

ii. you are skies away and from afar, i would watch in envy how the waves are able to worship your feet and how the breeze can caress your face while i remain in these lonely heights. And so, I go back to painting the skies with the shades of your lips, to gazing longingly from a distance, to watching you from afar; a little sad, that i'll never get to kiss you, a little glad, that i'll never get to burn you.

iii. the moon waxed and waned, and the stars twinkled and died and for each day, they kept on watching each other from afar whilst wishing that the wind would bring them closer, but it did not. their love remained static. it was never spoken, like a poetry drowned inside one’s lips, it was never meeting, like planets from different orbits, and it was never getting a chance at love, both in reality and in daydream.

— Fray Narte

[folatefangirl]

It’s a strange place, for sure, this world that has so much restlessness. There is a large range of mountains to the north that quiver now and again, tumbling piles of slate downhill as herds of deer flee. A volcano lies at the core, grumbling and groaning and occasionally spewing fire and rocks into the air before it quiets again. When it rumbles with dark clouds, shocks of bright lightning fly and crack against granite cliffs. Sometimes, if you peer into the clouds at the right moment in the early morning, you might see a red dragon curled up in the center of the lava, her translucent wings tucked against her scales.  

An ocean floods the west and south, iceberg blue and so cold that a wind gusting from it makes the skin prickle with goosebumps. Overhead, the sky is a moving blanket of stratus clouds that glow pink and gold at sunrise and purple and orange at sunset. When they part, the sky glows blue with scattered stars and thick clusters of galaxies.

Pine forests lift their branches towards the constellations and whisper secrets while crows and magpies flutter, cawing to their young. The earth is soft and dark with loam and smells of the decay of last year’s leaves and leavings. Although the air feels fresh, you can still taste the ashes of old fires. Columbine, fireweed, and lupin fill sweet-smelling meadows where bees and hummingbirds buzz as they feed.  

Near the center of the ocean, the water bubbles and shivers as new land begins to push itself to the surface. Dipping a hand beneath the surface, you can feel a warmth that contrasts the frigid tides crashing against coastal sands. Dark shadows of marine animals drift in the currents; at night their multitudes of eyes glow fluorescent green.

Across the ocean, more life awaits: a mudflat teems with scrabbling crabs and pockets of sea hares and mussels hidden among swathes of salt-scented mermaid’s hair. Black-tipped gulls swoop overhead, waiting for signs of their next meal.

Red dunes of sand lie to the east, continuously reshaping themselves with every gust of wind. Sometimes, the winds wear away so much of a dune that hidden things reveal themselves: a marble statue of a child, a teddy bear, dropped pens and pencils, a brown coat with brass buttons, a plane ticket dated for the first of September, and polka-dot ribbons, to name a few.

Oddly, the only building on this world is a small, weather-beaten cottage surrounded by rose-and-cream azalea bushes. A pot in the kitchen holds a spicy-smelling soup while whatever awaits in the oven strongly smells of vanilla and orange. You pick up a cup of tea that’s cooling on a counter and find that it tastes of apples and cinnamon. Bookshelves line almost every wall, filled with new and musty titles alike: fiction novels arranged to form a glossy rainbow, thick volumes of medicine and chemistry haphazardly grouped together along the lower shelves, poetry and art timidly spaced along the top. A rough, wooden box holds speed cubes, stacks of tarot cards, and stress balls next to a second box topped to the brim with worn notebooks, so full of ink and thoughts that the covers have begun to rip. Wherever you wander in the house, songs composed of drums and violins play in the background from hidden speakers, the rhythm just fast enough to encourage foot-tapping. Although you can barely hear it over the music, a creek burbles and splashes behind the house, dappled with the shadows of overhanging oak leaves.

--

Written to the Atlas: Space album by Sleeping At Last (which explains why I kinda got carried away by this prompt)

So, this isn’t my usual deal, but I have (what I thought to be) a good writing exercise for you! It’s nothing I created, but actually an assignment I did for my intro to theater class. It’s fairly simple, but a fantastic way to practice characterization and imagery! While this was originally intended for introspection and creativity, it can easily be applied to fictional characters as well.

If you were a planet, what it be like? What would it look like, sound like, smell of, feel like, taste of?

[readbookywooks]

Nijel, on the other hand, felt no such pounding. All he had to drive him onwards was imagination, but he did have enough of that to float a medium-sized war galley. He looked towards the city with what would have been, but for his lack of chin, an expression of setjawed determination.

Creosote realised that he was outnumbered.

‘Do they have any drink down there?’ he said.

‘Lots,’ said Nijel.

‘That might do for a start,’ the Seriph conceded. ‘All right, lead on, O peach-breasted daughter of-’

And no poetry.’

They untangled themselves from the thicket and walked down the hillside until they reached the road which, before very long, went past the aforementioned tavern or, as Creosote persisted in calling it, caravanserai.

They hesitated about going in. It didn’t seem to welcome visitors. But Conina, who by breeding and upbringing tended to skulk around the back of buildings, found four horses tethered in the yard.

They considered them carefully.

‘It would be stealing,’ said Nijel, slowly.

Conina opened her mouth to agree and the words ‘Why not?’ slid past her lips. She shrugged.

‘Perhaps we should leave some money-’ Nijel suggested.

‘Don’t look at me,’ said Creosote.

‘- or maybe write a note and leave it under the bridle. Or something. Don’t you think?’

By way of an answer Conina vaulted up on to the largest horse, which by the look of it belonged to a soldier. Weaponry was slung all over it.

Creosote hoisted himself uneasily on to the second horse, a rather skittish bay, and sighed.

‘She’s got that letter-box look,’ he said. ‘I should do what she says.’

Nijel regarded the other two horses suspiciously. One of them was very large and extremely white, not the off-white which was all that most horses could manage, but a translucent, ivory white tone which Nijel felt an unconscious urge to describe as ’shroud’. It also gave him a distinct impression that it was more intelligent than he was.

He selected the other one. It was a bit thin, but docile, and he managed to get on after only two tries.

They set off.

The sound of their hoofbeats barely penetrated the gloom inside the tavern. The innkeeper moved like someone in a dream. He knew he had customers, he’d even spoken to them, he could even see them sitting round a table by the fire, but if asked to describe who he’d talked to and what he had seen he’d have been at a loss. This is because the human brain is remarkably good at shutting out things it doesn’t want to know. His could currently have shielded a bank vault.

And the drinks! Most of them he’d never heard of, but strange bottles kept appearing on the shelves above the beer barrels. The trouble was that whenever he tried to think about it, his thoughts just slid away …

The figures around the table looked up from their cards.

One of them raised a hand. It’s stuck on the end of his arm and it’s got five fingers, the innkeeper’s mind said. It must be a hand.

One thing the innkeeper’s brain couldn’t shut out was the sound of the voices. This one sounded as though someone was hitting a rock with a roll of sheet lead.

BAR PERSON.

The innkeeper groaned faintly. The thermic lances of horror were melting their way steadily through the steel door of his mind.

LET ME SEE, NOW. THAT’S A - WHAT WAS IT AGAIN

‘A Bloody Mary.’ This voice made a simple drinks order sound like the opening of hostilities.

OH, YES. AND

‘Mine was a small egg none,’ said Pestilence.

AN EGG NOW.

‘With a cherry in it.’

GOOD, lied the heavy voice. AND THAT’LL BE A SMALL PORT WINE FOR ME AND, the speaker glanced across the table at the fourth member of the quartet and sighed, YOU’D BETTER BRING ANOTHER BOWL OF PEANUTS.

About three hundred yards down the road the horse thieves were trying to come to terms with a new experience.

‘Certainly a smooth ride,’ Nijel managed eventually.

‘And a lovely - a lovely view,’ said Creosote, his voice lost in the slipstream.

‘But I wonder,’ said Nijel, ‘if we have done exactly the right thing.’

‘We’re moving, aren’t we?’ demanded Conina. ‘Don’t be petty.’

‘It’s just that, well, looking at cumulus clouds from above is-’

‘Shut up.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Anyway, they’re stratus. Cumulus at most.’

‘Right,’ said Nijel miserably.

‘Does it make any difference?’ said Creosote, who was lying flat on his horse’s neck with his eyes shut.

‘About a thousand feet.’

‘Oh.’

‘Could be seven hundred and fifty,’ conceded Conina.

‘Ah.’

The tower of sourcery trembled. Coloured smoke rolled through its vaulted rooms and shining corridors. In the big room at the very tip, where the air was thick and greasy and tasted of burning tin, many wizards had passed out with the sheer mental effort of the battle. But enough remained. They sat in a wide circle, locked in concentration.

It was just possible to see the shimmering in the air as the raw sourcery swirled out of the staff in Coin’s hand and into the centre of the octogram.

Outlandish shapes appeared for a brief instant and vanished. The very fabric of reality was being put through the wringer in there.

Carding shuddered, and turned away in case he saw anything he really couldn’t ignore.

The surviving senior wizards had a simulacrum of the Disc hovering in front of them. As Carding looked at it again the little red glow over the city of Quirm flared and went out.

The air creaked.

‘There goes Quirm,’ murmured Carding.

‘That just leaves Al Khali,’ said one of the others.

‘There’s some clever power there.’

Carding nodded glumly. He’d quite liked Quirm, which was a -had been a pleasant little city overlooking the Rim Ocean.

He dimly recalled being taken there, once, when he was small. For a moment he gazed sadly into the past. It had wild geraniums, he recalled, filling the sloping cobbled streets with their musky fragrance.

‘Growing out of the walls,’ he said out loud. ‘Pink. They were pink.’

The other wizards looked at him oddly. One or two, of a particularly paranoid frame of mind even for wizards, glanced suspiciously at the walls.

‘Are you all right?’ said one of them.

‘Um?’ said Carding, ‘Oh. Yes, Sorry. Miles away.’

He turned back to look at Coin, who was sitting off to one side of the circle with the staff across his knees. The boy appeared to be asleep. Perhaps he was. But Carding knew in the tormented pit of his soul that the staff didn’t sleep. It was watching him, testing his mind.

It knew. It even knew about the pink geraniums.

‘I never wanted it to be like this,’ he said softly. ‘All we really wanted was a bit of respect.’

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

Carding nodded vaguely. As his colleagues resumed their concentration he glanced sideways at them.

Somehow, all his old friends had gone. Well, not friends. A wizard never had friends, at least not friends who were wizards. It needed a different word. Ah yes, that was it. Enemies. But a very decent class of enemies. Gentlemen. The cream of their profession. Not like these people, for all that they seemed to have risen in the craft since the sourcerer had arrived.

Other things besides the cream floated to the top, he reflected sourly.

He turned his attention to Al Khali, probing with his mind, knowing that the wizards there were almost certainly doing the same, seeking constantly for a point of weakness.

He thought: am I a point of weakness? Spelter tried to tell me something. It was about the staff. A man should lean on his staff, not the other way around … it’s steering him, leading him … I wish I’d listened to Spelter … this is wrong, I’m a point of weakness …

He tried again, riding the surges of power, letting them carry his mind into the enemy tower. Even Abrim was making use of sourcery, and Carding let himself modulate the wave, insinuating himself past the defences erected against him.

The image of the interior of the Al Khali tower appeared, focused …

… the Luggage trundled along the glowing corridors. It was exceedingly angry now. It had been awoken from hibernation, it had been scorned, it had been briefly attacked by a variety of mythological and now extinct lifeforms, it had a headache and now, as it entered the Great Hall, it detected the hat. The horrible hat, the cause of everything it was currently suffering. It advanced purposefully …

Carding, testing the resistance of Abrim’s mind, felt the man’s attention waver. For a moment he saw through the enemy’s eyes, saw the squat oblong cantering across the stone. For a moment Abrim attempted to shift his concentration and then, no more able to help himself than is a cat when it sees something small and squeaky run across the floor, Carding struck.

Not much. It didn’t need much. Abrim’s mind was attempting to balance and channel huge forces, and it needed hardly any pressure to topple it from its position.

Abrim extended his hands to blast the Luggage, gave the merest beginnings of a scream, and imploded.

The wizards around him thought they saw him grow impossibly small in a fraction of a second and vanish, leaving a black after-image …

The more intelligent of them started to run …

And the magic he had been controlling surged back out and flooded free in one great, randomised burst that blew the hat to bits, took out the entire lower levels of the tower and quite a large part of what remained of the city.

So many wizards in Ankh had been concentrating on the hall that the sympathetic resonance blew them across the room. Carding ended up on his back, his hat over his eyes.

They hauled him out and dusted him off and carried him to Coin and the staff, amid cheers - although some of the older wizards forbore to cheer. But he didn’t seem to pay any attention.

He stared sightlessly down at the boy, and then slowly raised his hands to his ears.

‘Can’t you hear them?’ he said.

The wizards fell silent. Carding still had power, and the tone of his voice would have quelled a thunderstorm.

Coin’s eyes glowed.

‘I hear nothing,’ he said.

Carding turned to the rest of the wizards.

‘Can’t you hear them?’

They shook their heads. One of them said, ‘Hear what, brother?’

Carding smiled, and it was a wide, mad smile. Even Coin took a step backwards.

‘You’ll hear them soon enough,’ he said. ‘You’ve made a beacon. You’ll all hear them. But you won’t hear them for long.’ He pushed aside the younger wizards who were holding his arms and advanced on Coin.

‘You’re pouring sourcery into the world and other things are coming with it,’ he said. ‘Others have given them a pathway but you’ve given them an avenue!’

He sprang forward and snatched the black staff out of Coin’s hands and swung it up in the air to smash it against the wall.

Carding went rigid as the staff struck back. Then his skin began to blister …

[superabundantdaydreams]

Superabundant Daydreams. . . ☁️

⟢ Hello! I'm your local cloud creature, Stratus Clouds!

⟢ Bodily 17 DID system of around 40 alters. They/he/one pronouns.

⟢ In the process of writing a personal project called In All Your Illness and we write some poetry too. The mentally unwell are embraced here, and those who aren't may become mentally ill after taking a read here (/silly)! Art is meant to comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comforted, after all.

⟢ Any and all questions about my work are welcome! I hope you enjoy your stay here!

⟢ Personal hashtags are #Stratus Clouds poetry and #IAYI updates. Avatar by @mylothedivine on artfight!

⟢ Here are our other blogs :

Collective blog - @stratus-clouds00 .

Atlas's blog - @atlas-the-avian .

Raiden Indigo's blog - @indigo-flowerss .

Basil / Flower's blog - @sunflowerr-guy .