#chalk
These days I speak in chalk, they hear in cheese,
my meanings crumble on the breeze.
I wake in strange places, though nothing's moved,
the same old room, but not improved.
The mirror knows me, but not my name
this quiet slipping, is this a game?
My voice returns from walls misheard,
each echo bends a faithful word.
I reach for sense, it turns to dust,
a language fractured by mistrust.
Familiar hands feel oddly worn,
like gloves I’ve kept since I was born.
The clock still ticks, but out of phase,
it counts in strange, uncharted ways.
And time, once firm beneath my feet,
now loops itself in soft defeat.
I walk, yet never quite arrive
am I the ghost, or still alive?
If I am chalk, then let me fade,
in quiet lines my truth once made.
And if they feast on cheese alone,
then let me learn to stand unknown.
Apr 10
Apr 10, 2026 at 2:14 AM UTC
painted our life with chalk on the street
pained me to see rain erase everything
the hours i spent
all the blood shed
only fading memories left in my head
strained to be starting over again
the love i thought saved me
i needed to save myself instead
only left with what is dead
Oct 21, 2025
Oct 21, 2025 at 9:22 AM UTC
Even when all
the ruby shards
and splinters
had vaporised,
I’d pretend
to gather
invisible
broken pieces
outlined in chalk.
May 1, 2021
May 1, 2021 at 2:52 PM UTC
Take my hand and we’ll jump through the pastel chalk powder.
We can be a different creature.
Both of us can go and feel at home.
Not here.
This can be an ode to my friends and my closest family.
Because you are always so dear and understanding, especially now that we're here.
Finally.
Look now all around, it feels full of options but it still makes you nauseous, yes I know.
Take my hand and let me show you why I have to go through the pastel powder.
Let me be a different creature, I feel sick when I stick around.
Both of us can feel at home now when we jump right through the ground.
A chalk pavement painting.
Let's go right into the pavement painting.
Let me take you.
Pastel, not too bright but soft and light.
Comfortable.
This painting is an ode to my dear friends and closest family.
Because you're always so dear and some things you understand so well.
Come on let me take care of those wounds and soreness with a chalk powder.
A soft chalky powder smell.
And soft colours for strange creatures.
We can be.
A different kind of creature when we go through the chalk powder on the pavement.
Take my hand, we can be, we can be...
Soft.
Comfortable.
Happy.
Smooth.
Peaceful.
Loving.
Nov 6, 2020
Nov 6, 2020 at 12:44 PM UTC
When he’s standing in your doorway
Clean-shaven, distanced,
Recognize that once he was
Scouring the cracks in the blacktop,
Picking pansies with the weeds
And clumping them together to declare
The love letters he had written along the sidewalks,
Blue chalk sprawling beside her walk home.
And one day he was standing before her desk,
A medley of a bouquet lodged under his fingernails,
That he took to be the most beautiful piece of art.
Lips slightly chapped, chest rising quickly,
In a moment of unadulterated courage he ****** his arms forward
To present the best offering he could.
And all she saw was the dirt.
Oct 8, 2020
Oct 8, 2020 at 9:47 PM UTC
There is always a moment when you pull away from a hug. That is the moment when a kiss would occur, should the situation call for it. It is the moment when only your heads and torsos have pulled away. Your feet stay in place, tucked between each other in a pattern on the ground, and your hands stay where they are, but draped loosely instead of holding on tight. For a breath of time within this moment, you are in middle school. Your date to the dance sways across from you, your hands around her waist and hers around your neck. Neither of you know enough to hold on to each other, this is just how you dance. But you know to hold on now, in this hug. In this moment. There’s nothing you want more than to hold on. To lean in and make something count just a little bit more. The hesitation lasts longer than any breath you’ve held under the surface of a chilly lake in late May. It takes more air than you could win back in a lifetime. Hesitation rules for a synchronized blink of your locked eyes before it pushes them away from each other and your hands lose the grip they finally learned, giving up on what they longed for. Maybe your cheeks are pink. Maybe they’re used to this. And maybe you’re crazy, but you didn’t think you could miss the smell of someone’s spit.
Jan 7, 2020
Jan 7, 2020 at 9:53 PM UTC
I drew the word "pride"
But it's the Pan flag.
Underneath it it's the same
But it's a trans flag
I couldn't draw a demiromantic and/or a genderflux flag with chalk.
Now we wait for my parents to see
Aug 29, 2019
Aug 29, 2019 at 2:49 PM UTC
I write to you
pages of my lost years
baffled
between the absent present
and the distant past
I write to you
my thoughts burn out
in my mind
and the smoke comes out
from my ears and mouth
the cloud weeps over my head
and the flower blooms inside my heart
I write to you
my words turn into chaos
into fictional stories
turns into a trifling joke
without meaning
without taste
I write to you
like an adult
would do
but your love taught me
not to grow up
to remain a child
and just let it go
I write your name
this time on the wall
with a yellow chalk
and sit there
watching the drops of rain
dissolving your four letters name.
Jan 23, 2019
Jan 23, 2019 at 8:07 AM UTC
Chalk
She is a rainbow of colours inside a black and white TV.
She is dancing in the streets of Paris with gaiety.
She is eloquence unnecessary, for she is perfect for me.
She is grace beyond call;
She is sympathy to misery.
She is what you would never expect her to be.
She is here; she is with me.
She is the One who would make Cleopatra suffer from envy.
She is beauty, she is tragedy, she is my remedy.
She is all things to me.
She is lost in a wish that may never be.
She is hoped for more than you could ever imagine.
She is an artist, she is relevant and she is necessary.
She is beauty personified…
Paint a chalk outline of me.
(C)2018 Aa Harvey. All Rights Reserved.
May 8, 2018
May 8, 2018 at 2:39 PM UTC
I found chalk on the holding
of sky shimmers, then I composed
on the blank spaces that where
echoes of what was drawn in
memories of yesterdays dreams.
Barren slate needed the imagination,
woven between fingers streaming
across an arborealis of creativity.
I am the drawer of dreams that
were colourless and now fill a void.
I outlined the slumbering's of what were
just blank smudges. Now revitalized,
I'm within this moment, a collage of
colourful wishes that I created before I
look smiling, tomorrows imaginings drawn again.
Mar 13, 2018
Mar 13, 2018 at 7:03 PM UTC
When I wept before you
watching my emotions fall like
crayon colours
Painting the floor with immature
emotions...
did you read the colours I spelt..
Or did you just see irregular patterns
spelling out my pleas...
that were like chalk drawings
to your understandings
Oct 15, 2017
Oct 15, 2017 at 7:01 PM UTC
The storm has passed. Its surrender was swift
as chalk wiped away from a wet, slate board.
Jan 3, 2016
Jan 3, 2016 at 4:27 PM UTC
Right in the middle of the busiest area of the Poconos, the group of condos sit in a large circle. The sky is dark, for it has been hidden from all possible sunlight by the many awnings and porches that join the different housing units. On one side of the condos the neon lights from the bar next door shine through the children’s windows, but the more occupied side the parking lot is lined with fast food restaurants- clumped together and riotous with large families that frequent them, juggling their small children and many diaper bags; and noisy cars speeding past with loud engines, pungent, murky exhaust spewing out of the back and police sirens constantly blaring down the street. In the parking lot encircled by the condos the tenant kids run around full of light yet somehow full of darkness at the same time. The older kids come out of the small houses to sit on the sidewalk in the evening, and the cracked sidewalks are covered with the faded chalk drawings left there by the youngsters earlier in the day, and with the sheets of crumbled up paper containing poetry no one would ever read, and with the old needles and discarded blunts of their parents who had left them there over the course of the day.
There is one unit in particular, a unit with a broken door from the many men who had tried to force their way in, a unit with holes in every wall that were put there by flying fists and thrown objects that had missed their true target- the oldest daughter. In front of the many holes in the their smiles are fake and their hugs are forced.
Nov 28, 2016
Nov 28, 2016 at 3:50 AM UTC
She signs in the
Rain
So that I may see –
Drizzled words, despots and
Defiance, never defeat.
And
She cries in the
Rain
So that I may never see –
What could never be cured, be
Culled; our calamity.
And
I walk on in the
Rain
So that I may never learn how to –
Fix, never learn to forgive,
Most certainly, to forget.
And
It’s just that simple in the
Rain,
Sign, cry or walk –
We become disposable,
And like chalk on sidewalks,
We all wash away.
Oct 31, 2016
Oct 31, 2016 at 10:25 PM UTC
I am not feeling
the inspiration today.
No chalk and blank slate
Apr 13, 2015
Apr 13, 2015 at 7:56 PM UTC
The sun burns bright all day and night
The moon comes to steal it's light
I was sitting by myself
I couldn't help to notice your shine
I was sitting by my chalk outline on the floor
You came like the sun to destroy the night that held me before
You don't have to dress up like a
Barbie doll to look so beautiful
I'll make sure you shine like you're supposed to
You don't deserve to feel like you're being used
I was sitting by my chalk outline on the floor
You came like the sun to destroy the night that held me before
And they’re just want to remind you
That there's nothing you can do
But I'm here to tell you
I’m in love with everything that you do
I don't mind your cold fingertips
That means my body is warm for you
Sitting, waiting for you to decide
If you want to go out or stay by my side
I was sitting by my chalk outline on the floor
And you came like the sun to destroy the night that held me before
So come sit by my side and set me on fire with your love
Who needs the world when I’ve got the girl that burns like the sun
https://spencercarlson.bandcamp.com/track/chalk-outline
Jan 27, 2015
Jan 27, 2015 at 9:21 PM UTC
On the paint chipped pavement we went over the rules:
NO cherry bombs, NO bobbling,
NO lower-ballers, spin-tops,
chalk walkers, twenty fingers,
and especially NO skyscrapers.
So for a few minutes we played as raw as apple skin knees,
it was the roughest, toughest, hard-nosed game
of four square any fourth grader has ever seen.
But it was all over when someone crossed the line.
There was fussing, cussing, and an accusation of the mustnt’s.
Eyebrows adjacent, we argued and clawed like kilkenny cats,
we were breaking rules, we crossed the chalk.
We took sides and worst of all,
the one crucial act that we regret,
we slammed the ball down.
It towered overhead like window washers
and landed on the school’s roof.
We stopped arguing. Nobody won that day.
© Matthew Harlovic
Oct 28, 2014
Oct 28, 2014 at 9:29 PM UTC
Look at the size of that chalk outline,
The evidence labelled from one to nine,
Hear the sirens cry throughout the night,
The screams of despair, the gasps at the sight.
For the chalk outline, common it was,
White powder stained with drops of blood,
Outlining a corpse, a reflection of death,
But this one was less, than two feet in length
Sep 17, 2014
Sep 17, 2014 at 1:14 AM UTC
Draw me in pencil,
Draw me in chalk,
Draw me in bright colours,
Draw me with shades,
Or draw me paint brush
Stokes and all,
But if you draw me in your mind, do it so you never forget me at all.
May 23, 2014
May 23, 2014 at 4:12 AM UTC
Painted in white where the body fell,
A shadow of death an outline
Of a final breath.
Each drawing never the same,
Drawn to show death,
A resting place
Life lost,
Just a white shadow
No age,
No name.
Not knowing
If a
Woman,
Or man.
A child
Never wishing to see that outline.
An outline to many, have I seen,
So many fallen
All that is remembered,
Is the white outline,
Where life left
And death begins.
Jun 22, 2014
Jun 22, 2014 at 6:52 PM UTC
Place silhouette pieces or outlines of my heart in thirty or more envelopes.
Paste each one with a new soft paintbrush which clean cream bristles. Push them into torn up fragments of clean new watercolour paper. The sharp edges feel through onto the wooden table leaving mistaken, accidental grooves. Glimmers of sawdust are ****** up into the pockets of your lungs, where they contaminated and will permanently sit.
It was a small heart, the colour of grey sky reflected on seas and carried in bloated raindrops. The texture of diamond. Carved up as easily as wax by a blunt butter knife.
The envelopes are neatly labelled with white tailors chalk powders.
Apr 27, 2014
Apr 27, 2014 at 12:20 PM UTC