Showing posts with label Carter Billis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carter Billis. Show all posts

Monday, March 12, 2018

Another nice one from Carter!

Our Carter


Not Yet

Aimlessly
I sit in bed all day
Schoolwork never done
Head always filled
With thoughts I can’t explain
But that’ll never change
So I’ll just keep writing
Nothing and everything
‘Til the pages of my notebooks are covered in stains
Just like the sweatpants that I’m always wearing.

Thursday, February 22, 2018



Carter Billis
Balloon
by Carter Billis

String tied tightly around my wrist
My thoughts float loosely in the wind
Enclosed in a safe of latex.
Can’t get too far from me
I could lose touch with myself
But can’t get too close
I could lose touch with reality
I’ll keep them hovering at about ten feet Hoping nothing comes to pop them
when I’m not looking.



Friday, October 6, 2017

Carter Billis brings us a poem, The Boy That Never Sleeps

The Boy That Never Sleeps

Carter Billis
Sometimes I need to be reassured that I'm not the only      
one in this world,
that there are more people here than I can count
on my fingers and toes.
When I'm walking down a busy street,
it feels like I could walk for miles,
anywhere my feet could bring me.
I'm boundless, ready to see everything I haven't seen,
on my way to meet everyone I couldn't elsewhere,
prepared to do all the things that I've never done.
I wasn't made to be alone.
I wasn't made to be motionless.
I was made to live freely.
I was made not to follow the crowd,
but to explore every crowd there is,
to have time, even if brief, in everyone's lives.
I want to make my way into their photographs,
into the pages of their journals,
into their kindest thought.
I want to repay the energy I'm gifted from others
until there's a never ending flow in and out of me,
enough to keep me rolling until there's
nothing left to see.




(This was for a homework idea to write about a place you'd like to go to or remember from having been there.  Carter must have been thinking of The City That Never Sleeps, right?  NYC.)


And here's the piece Carter wrote in our session October 4th in response to the prompt, quotating Galway Kinnell, "Poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment."  (So read on until the last line.)


recently I've found that poetry ...

I was born on May 29th.  This means that
I'm a gemini. 
Characteristically, gemini's are the signs
that talk the most, and even with my

shy nature, I find this to be true.
I have all of these thoughts in
my mind, and frankly I would
explode if they didn't all come
out somehow.  Usually they're
documented as text
conversations with my friends
or posts on social media, but
recently I've found that poetry,
if that's what you can call
my writing, is an effective way
of expression.  Perhaps this is
prose.  Perhaps it's just endless
banter.  But what matters is that
I'm expressing my thoughts with
as little concealment as possible.