My ebook "Train Rides and Purple Skies in Jersey" is a chapbook of poetry. All poetry and the cover art is copywritten. Feel free to share the book with others if you are so compelled. If you are interested in using any of the work, contact me for permissions at smorehead@gmail.com. (c) 2010 Stephanie Morehead

1. Train Rides and Purple Skies
In Jersey
By: Stephanie L. Morehead

2. Bridge
I remember what the blank page looked like. After the head-bang of cacophony, there is:
A sparkling symphony of nothing. A quieting embrace of Love.
Peace stills throbs. Translucence calms fears.
Erase me. Saturate me.
Gone. God.
2

3. Graffiti
My words are graffiti, saying nothing with color.
When I'm not sleeping, the sun shines in my eyes and I look at the Jersey freight fields
and the skyline of New York approaching. And I relate the landscape to my own personal
continent.
It's getting too crowded in here. Gotta free up some space, minimize, bulldoze, repave,
plant trees. Tend to my wild garden. I am restless and sinful and carefree...trying to
remember what's good in me. And fuck you if you're judging me...you are no better than
me.
Will you remember me? I was someone who believed. I was pure, and naked, and I
believed. Until I was deceived by a man who turned cold on me and I'll never know why
and I don't want to know why. But yea, I'm still recovering.
So now my words are like graffiti... Bold and bloody and just don't give a fuck... But at
the core of rebellion is a broken heart, yearning to be healed, dying for the one thing that
can heal.
3

4. Seed
Karma prevails over the
Screeching rails,
Speeding time, and
Churning minds.
All we have is now
And we miss it
Again and again.
Mind over matter
Except I am not my mind
Or my parents' daughter...
Just one small seed
Beyond tongue and hourglass.
4

5. Sakura
I walked down the hill,
Cherry blossoms shed their buds
For lust of summer.
The moments and rain
Blew tiny kisses at me:
So ephemeral.
I am a cat on
My fourth life
Trying not to die this time.
On the bus today,
The expanse of the city
Was exposed to me…
Existential unfolding.
5

6. Salsa
You spun me
Into percussion
Que endulza la sal
The band was
Loud like
Diced peppers
My hair dripped
Wild Caribbean beads
But all I noticed
Was your smile.
6

7. Midwifery of NYC
New York births moments.
Seconds like and
Unlike the ones before.
Another skyscraper,
Another hotdog stand,
Another man in a suit,
Another person wearing an iPod,
And the minute hands
Are reborn again and again.
Then there’s the haphazard
Invasion of boundaries and
The interactions
Of eight million people.
I’ve learned to inhale on the way
Through her concrete womb,
Impregnated New York,
Mother of a billion stories,
Financial Mecca,
Shopping haven,
Home of the best pizza.
The artists, and the actors,
And the struggling poets,
All flock to New York – as art is creation and
New York is in a constant state of creation.
And my toes haven’t touched the
Atlantic in years as I pretend
I’m not aging and suspend activities
That remind me of the fact.
I feel New Jersey in my cells,
Native to the bone.
I am just a midwife to Manhattan,
An outsider visiting for work purposes,
A facilitator of some births.
Each day I exhale on the way
Home to my suburbs,
My malls and population density,
The inflation, immigration,
Urban sprawl of it all,
The McMansions and clash of populations,
Its fragmented past,
The tiny blip on the map.
7

8. Catnap
Dreams go on plane trips
Across the sky’s ink.
I scratch your back with the
Hint of a claw, shedding like
Virtues and hairs down the drain.
You spill out on open ground,
Soda pop I must lick up.
I want to collect your sugar and carbon,
Put dignity back into you. But,
Trash is falling on the side roof.
The polar iceberg has chipped
Beyond repair.
I don’t know what will be there
When the train stops.
It sped past Newark, the
Chrome aching over
An addicted uncle.
You curl up in a new position and
Clutch your belongings.
Whole cities evolve in your
Peripheral vision regardless
Of how familiar.
Change strikes up like a match.
Manhattan is alive on my tongue.
The streets are winks,
The subway a huge lung,
Feeling at one,
Stretching.
8

9. Brush strokes
You and I
Are stone and petal
Role reversal.
You: impressed by
Monet.
I: impasto by
Van Gogh.
We squeeze
Oranges,
Revolving doors,
And more.
As we lick the citrus and
Syntax from our lips,
Wood engenders wood.
The man is not fond of
Our trail mix and
Complex carbohydrates.
Class A, Class B
What are we?
Raritan valley…
Nestled in a
Condominium,
Branded by
Dialect and denim.
If History is the backpack,
Xanax is the shoulder. We’re all
Happily numb to the
Weight of our palms.
Will you throw the rock,
My friend?
Give us grace,
Purple grapes, and
Fear of God.
9

10. State of quasi-consciousness
I want to think of something
Other than men, love and sex.
I've had it. I mean it this time.
I want to throw this cell phone
Into the Hudson River.
I erased every picture I had of you
As if our time together
Never existed.
I’m letting the current of life
Sweep me away,
Splash salt water on my face,
Swallow the sand.
Who the hell called me from Vegas
Five times last night?
If it was important, you should have
Left a message.
Fucking parliament lights, ragged flip flops,
Chipped pedicure, Dunkin Donuts coffee cups,
Black north face messenger bag, expanding
My digital music collection…
And is it sick that my favorite words are
Fuck and hell?
And any derivative of the two…
These addictions are busying my mind
From zen…
And I feel like I made some bad choices
Aligning myself with the wrong side
In this game of spiritual warfare.
Set up shop in Babylon,
Living in a state of comfort and
Apathy.
Pluck the guitar strings for me, baby.
Make me dance.
Make me forget.
What’s this say about me?
Think I care?
What makes things worse-
10

11. I’m haunted by love
In the attic of my heart
And by your ghosts floating about.
I need these distractions
Like a junkie.
Shadow puppets on my cave wall…
I have no ambition other
Than to be as comfortable as
Possible.
This is me without strategy.
11

12. Wolf Tones
I feel like a trumpet-
Bursts of notes and air
A dark timbre
Emerges from
Brass spirals
Howling at the
April moon
Memories of Corwin,
Life was ripe as
A tangerine
Bees were abandoned
Jars of honey
Licked clean
I'm going to Midtown
With scuffed heels and
A bag of lightning
12

13. Theology
A repertoire of names is
Gnosis bubbling on your tongue
A slug that ignites the canon
Words build worlds
In the 17th century,
We free-thought the Bible,
Classified it as myth
Or poetry…
From the fruit of the tree
To the scholarly minds…
Idea slaughters idea
In libraries and on farms.
Is something lost in the
Weeding process?
A fertile dirt,
An essential oil…
Agnostics feign no sense of smell
Or sight with eyes shut.
Why must reason and faith
Cause an internal earthquake?
13

14. The Composition of Glass
Glass is the offspring of fusion and melted matter.
Clear glass is clear due to an absence of color.
Nothing valid distinguishes it from other glass
except lack of tint. The hegemony of clear glass
would have you believe, at the cost of morality,
by any means necessary, that homogeneity is
paramount for all buildings in society. But glass is
glass and this teeters on the edge. And it makes you
ashamed to be see-through. The lengths it has gone
and is willing to go to propel itself and its translucent
exterior. When glass cuts and shards, smashing
ties to all other glass, tearing itself apart, you’re left
to judge that perhaps clear glass is lacking substance.
14

15. North East Corridor
I intuit art everywhere:
Where breathing meets history,
Tree meets tree,
And freight meets the sea.
Art is found in
The song and the note,
When phlegm and words
Get caught in the throat or sink
Deep into your lake of fuss.
The past is missed.
It's stitched into my veins but
Nostalgia is an illness when you see
Ghosts of living people.
I'm drinking a saccharine poison
With a copy of Neruda on my lap.
I'm swept away to the Chilean landscape
And his love of penumbras,
Sensing tenses and sand.
In America,
Conquering trumps survival.
It's written in brick and graffiti.
Unless you're a chick,
Then it's diets and no power.
Gorging and purging,
Disposing income in receptacles,
Swiping credit cards
To feed our perversions and
The leaves are no longer green
But we don't notice since
We are all carnivores.
15

16. Ferocity
Woman with
Honey and venom
In your skin and
Sunset flowing
Down your back
I want to look
I want to touch
You sound
Just like the blue jay
When your wings
Reflect the sky
And it’s clear
All days are numbered
So in secret
You fly
There is no other poet
No other song with
Such ferocity
Your voice is dough
Rising in your chest…
Music that’s bread to digest
When crust gets stale it’s
Just another stone
To throw
And you throw it
And you throw away
Trust like dust
There's a ball
In the air
Forging its own path
With the momentum
Of living force
And third eye
Open
You point your finger.
What’s the point
Of pointing fingers?
It points right back.
16

17. Open your fist
For once to see
There’s some
Accountability
In each little
Swirling print
I want to look
I want to touch
Railroad tracks
Trace the flesh
Of the earth
Like Varicose veins
Her children pull at
Her teats
Hungrily
And I
Am a maverick
Daughter
Blemished and
Half mad
I don't step softly with
A broken boot and split ends
I take out a compact
To draw some lines but
This is me
You are me
It's all a mirror
All of us
I’ll count all the stars
With a prayer on my lips
I want to look
I want to touch
Who am I to speak?
This unkempt head of mine
But I do speak
The wild spark in my earth brown eye
I know it's there
And I hope it always resides there
I hope it always shows
17

18. And I pray
I am water. I am water that caresses…and flows...inundates...dries up... Soothing liquid
and destructive waves...I am always striving to balance these tides.
But the impulse to love…to bathe in love…and wash in love...that I'll take, baby. I won't
shut off the flow. There’s too much in this sea to cease. Sip me up... And I will calm the
storms...still the whirlwinds...keep her steady.
Everything is changing today and tomorrow. I should probably be scared. People don't
want to reproduce; the world is at a cusp. But I am fierce in my chest. I am fierce but also
kind and blessed. And I won't forget you or where I come from or who I come from.
And I pray. I pray.
I pray to keep the furious child splashing around in my soul, wreaking havoc and having
tantrums, keep her soothed and happy, quiet and at ease.
18

19. Metaphorically speaking
Today poetry is
Not in the moment.
It’s trapped like a
Fly in amber.
Forever…
Solid once liquid.
And I…
Am alone with the day,
Pinching the cheeks
Of the sky,
Pretending like
A blade of grass.
19

20. Canvas
Sometimes the canvas calls
In the morning.
Its very fabric beckons presence
And brush strokes to
Fill the space.
You yearn for permanent ink
That can’t be erased.
But why must the way you think
Be your god?
You fight tooth and nail to
Win your side.
You revolt against what’s right
To be right.
You spend a fortune to cultivate it…
Your ego, your drive, Freud’s obsession,
Your most prized possession.
But…
Maybe we are the masterpiece…
Free, willful artists painting in the
Mess and emptiness,
Oil stains on our fingertips.
I take the sponge and I wring it,
I wring it of all the liquid
And paint that
It’s absorbed…
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