The Sound of Ink

Love will not let you forget your broken heart or spare you the pain of tearing yourself into a puzzle. When romance sheds its skin, truth can emerge ugly or with such beauty  the spirit is speechless. There is risk in vulnerable, to open a soul’s diary to be read by a stranger. I have been burnt by passion, frozen with goodbye, and tepid with numbness, but no matter how infertile the soil, I’ve grown. If I were an open book, I’d tell you all my secrets, but be assured I never will … I can reveal when it reaches its final page the words will be, “I never gave up on love.” ©Susie Clevenger 2026 New What's Going On? ~ Open Link  

There was  no harvest the last day. Seeds were left like orphans in fields to grow wild, to face wind without shelter. From a lone oak an owl watched the moon weep for gardens that no longer danced with her shadow. Out in the dust, the rust, the decay the ghosts of men are herded like cattle across drought burdened  earth cursed by their greed.  ©Susie Clevenger 2025 NaPoWriMo Day 21  

Everyone ages – If you’re breathing, you’ve already collected some minutes rushing toward years. Time passes – I limp walk into another birthday, hair turning whiter, and attitude growing louder. There’s a limit – on how far I’ll go, and how much I’ll take, when wisdom has more rings than the twig I planted at eighteen. I’m there – The place where patience is thin, time is short, and people pleasing is a dance I no longer wish to attend.  ©Susie Clevenger 2025 NaPoWriMo Day 9  

I can never be all the things I want nor those others wish I could be. I want to read the unwritten, swim seas yet unnamed, and paint Sunday without crosses to bear. If I were a book, the reader would search the last page to try to understand why it was written without punctuation.  ©Susie Clevenger 2025 NaPoWriMo ~ Day 4  

It is in darkness life feels normal. Moon and starlight are old friends who’ve never abandoned me nor judged my lack of faith. They are guardians of my tears, counselors for my bitterness, angels administering hope. In the valley of shadows I can see more than  bleached headlines  of daylight hypocrisy.  Grown from a vine of sapphire, nursed by the galaxy when insomnia’s colic twists me into despair, I am stronger from walking darkness than sunburnt hours of abuse.  ©Susie Clevenger 2025 What's Going On? ~ The Dark  

"In my deepest January when grief  and life sits on my heart stoning joy I let my muse lead me to a smile" ~ S.C. January, dressed in the couture  of hand me downs made from  rusty leaves and autumn’s echo, dances her shadow down the sidewalk not caring if tomorrow the sun finds her naked. While humans moan of summer’s loss, January relishes the cold caress of winter.  There are no demands for shade  or knives pruning the fragile green of freckled stems nursing on her limbs. On the short days of light she is a  gallery for red cardinals, the sassy blue of the jay, and the obsidian sheen of a crow cawing its decree it owns the forest. Relishing she arrives first every new year January jokes with the wind, “Soon the Season of Resolutions will light its candle and humans will snuff it within a week.  ©Susie Clevenger 2025 What's Going On? ~ In Your Deepest January

Art should be served for breakfast, over easy or hard boiled, oatmeal or Danish, or a cup of black coffee poured into an astronaut cup demanding it needs more space. I love the mania of my insomnia is greeted with the weird on my walls, the odd on my shelves, and the bright splash of painted hearts dancing with shadows in my living room.  There is an anthology of quotes placed like easter eggs in frames for me to search when I can’t decide which mood to wear with my pajamas. An early riser wired with ADHD the squirrel cage in my brain attempts to conjure focus, but fails to leave crumbs for me to follow so the helter skelter  of my décor is the storm I find calm in. I enjoy my museum eclectic. It has bits of quiet and fever for attention. My curiosities, creations, and ink run cage free feeding on dust and fingerprints. Yes, art should be served for breakfast. I can sit amongst my gaggle of muses, spoon a teaspoon of cackles in my coffee, and ponder how many flowers it will ta...

Poetry inspired by art piece: Mirror, Mirror by Rosary Unate  used with permission Should I surrender my mirror to the eye of someone else? The truth in the glass is for me to see, to love, to search my spirit for strength, and acknowledge my weaknesses. Beauty is as unique as a fingerprint. I have no wish to bully myself into broken, to destroy my original to be a copy. Should I surrender my mirror? No! My mirror is mine. It is my choice what it reflects.  ©Susie Clevenger 2024

My wings are feathers of ink and pages, spines of titles, wonders that form from every sentence and exclamation.  In late autumn’s  storm of leaves I will be your umbrella so you won’t feel their tears. A thousand clipped blossoms spilled across the sand from an open car door. I suppose someone thought it was romantic, a gesture to awe a heart. In the dust mirror of summer all I could see was a garden grieving it could no longer hear the honeybees. Winter watches from the horizon. It’s barren antlers of oak limbs writing gothic poems across brittle grass that can longer feel the color of green.  He tossed his hat into the wind trusting fate had a warm heart. Silly man never considered fire takes a spark, not a sliver of ice.  If I lit a candle for each of my mistakes, I’d have every bridge burned before I could cross it.  open me to ink there are a thousand stories buried on my tongue ©Susie Clevenger 2024 Word Crafters Prompt  

She sits on my shoulder,  a feathered sage whispering to my dreams about a tomorrow I can’t see and doors yet to be open. With the gentle touch of my hair resting against her owl feathers I feel the caress of angels who  watch from Capricorn’s moon, and loneliness feels less empty. Outside my window trees write their wind stories across the glass. Without a sound the owl stirs  the silence with its wings. Within me the knowing forms, it is time for her to leave to write her own page in the journal of midnight. ©Susie Clevenger 2024  

I’m a dandelion seed, an astronaut trying to find home in a world that views me as a weed. Among the thistles of human judgement a free spirit is labeled hostile to the maintenance of status quo. Different is called demon, a light to be extinguished, a disruption  in the religion of forced definition.  ©Susie Clevenger 2024

Sylvia Path 1932-1963 Dead Grass It is agony to feel irrelevant.  I wonder if the earth swallowed me  anyone would worry I was gone or be more concerned about why the grass won’t grow any more.  Walking Dead The sun on my arms feels lonely. As much as I hunger for light my spirit has grown too comfortable with shadows. I’m the walking dead, a candle without a match. Blind Paper I beg ink for something to say. The blind eye of white paper frightens me. So Many Crossroads I took a long walk out of my mind. Insanity had so many crossroads I could never find my way back to me. ©Susie Clevenger 2024  

My mom says my imagination is too big. I should cut it into smaller pieces so the coloring book in my head can fit on the kitchen table. But how do I shrink the moon or turn a rainbow into ribbon when tomorrow seems a year away? I never fit where I am or reach where I want to go. Chairs are uncomfortable, shoes keep my feet from feeling the grass, and every time I see a butterfly I know one day I’ll have wings. Mom can’t hear the dandelions or hold a spoon against the window to catch drops of sunlight before night covers it with stars.  I don’t think I ever want to grow up. I’d be too bored. Where would I put my teddy bears when my bed is nothing but an ocean of pillows? Susie Clevenger 2024  What's Going On? ~ Children   Susie Clevenger 2024

I wonder if my legacy will merely be a faint light in the peripheral vision of a passer’s eye or a shadow figure of a memory, the name on the tip of a tongue one can’t seem to form.   No matter how many letters I write to my ten-year-old self she doesn’t seem to trust she will ever be first in line because she’s been taught, she’s supposed to be last.   I am beginning to understand why I’ve always been in love with dandelions. They are petaled, defiant sunlight thriving where nothing else can.     ©Susie Clevenger 2023

  “The body knows things a long time before  the mind catches up to them.  I was wondering what my body knew that I didn't. ” ― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees Am I building a hive of thoughts or is it simply I hold on to what I should let whither into forgotten? There’s no industry in building on a scrapbook that is filled  with artful attempts to decorate misery. Not every seed holds light nor  does sitting in a dead garden bring the bee to gather hope’s pollen. A bee’s wings move with incredible speed to remain still…Perhaps my mind’s frantic motion is the sound of my spirit ushering me toward tranquility. Oh grief, I’ve sat beneath your black lace that teases with release, but it is I who must seek the sun.  Even a rose grows when the clock chimes midnight. I wish life would not bring its hurricanes that demand resilience, yet do I expect my humanity to give me escape, when it is the honeybee that fights the hands of men so I might live. ...

  There was an emptiness in the air as I clung to the stem, a thorned rose who trusted scissors would never bleed me into water and glass to die on a shelf without ever tasting moonlight again.   Hands smooth as my red petals hovered over my face in a butterfly pause I felt I would escape…my imperfection too obvious to an eye determined to ribbon me among snow cheeked lilies.   Yet separation came in a determined cut that divided me from my sister blossoms and the root hum of mother earth.   With why clipped from my tongue I became little more than a trophy, a pretty “thing” to be admired, a handmaid of ego that sought praise while calculating how long I’d survive in the vinegar of artificial rain.   Intention or not, when wilting came, I was pulled through the throat of the vase. I did not succumb to the fate of a plastic shroud, but was gently lain on green grass by a small hand amongst a dandelion rosary.   ©Susie Clevenger 2022 Earthweal     ...

  Hymns once rattled stained glass and stone built to house the faithful.   In the middle of nowhere footprints ate grass, a biblical apocalypse growing dust where green once gathered.   When hallelujahs failed to grow numbers in pews, failure’s eye stared into the sun without repentance for planting doom where the meadowlark once sang.   Within the very echo of the last human leaving, bird, beast, and field gathered to redeem Eden from the curse of abandoned.   Revival now speaks in seeds and prayer rows of growing. Butterflies are winged notes singing praises for summer.   Crows own the pulpit, rainbows the baptistry. What man purloined; nature reclaimed. The tabernacle of Mother Earth grows stronger without walls. ©Susie Clevenger 2022 Earthweal Re-Wilding  

  In the backward forward I unravel, unfeather.   Destiny sits on my shoulder warning, “Use your voice to divide truth from the noise of what shouldn’t be heard. Earth spins on broken bones. Be the calm in the fire, balm for the wound.”   Today is what I’m given. Tomorrow is my hope.   I am one linked to the heartbeat of many. For every feather I’ve lost there’s a hundred forming new wings. I’m a dandelion owl trusting I can see change through clouds of concrete. ©Susie Clevenger 2022 Earthweal Re-Wilding

  Bottled Moon She poured moonlight into a bottle, dream elixir, perfume of wishes to place on her temples to protect her in the shadow winter of grief. ©Susie Clevenger 2022 Dandelion Skin I’m the wish grown from dandelion bouquets, and shades of moonlight. Rebellion’s child bold in yellow petals formed in stony fields of secrets. ©Susie Clevenger 2022 Apple in Water Tower Town I’m an apple in a water tower town. A sister serpent who doesn’t garden with a Bible or submit to a rib.   Branded a witch with banned book wings I collect whispers in journals and judgement in ink.   From the highest peak of narrow, I see what the faithful won’t hear. I’m in the left of right and preacher’s scape goat sermon Jezebel.  ©Susie Clevenger 2022 The Sunday Muse #219

  Dressed for Consequences There is no romance in dread. It is a decayed ballroom where hell makes you dance the razor edge of making the wrong choice. ©Susie Clevenger 2022 Scars Uprising   In her garden of glass she was bold enough to grow among wounds. ©Susie Clevenger 2022 Spell of Paint   Art will find color in the deepest gray, find a path where night suffers without stars.   A paintbrush is the sorcerer’s wand casting its spell across canvas.   ©Susie Clevenger 2022