Congratulations to Channing Neorr for winning 2019 Page High School’s Poet Laureate (in which students asked to submit poems and then are judged by a committee), she submitted her winning poems “Allow for the pollination of your Mind (flowers), “Jitterbug perfume by Tom Robbins” and “Symphony of the still trees”.

PxP: How does it feel to be Page’s Poet Laureate?

CN: “It feels really good and everyone’s been really nice about it. And a lot of teachers and students have congratulated me so it’s really cool and I’m glad that people liked my writing

PxP: How long have you been writing?

CN: “I’ve been writing for years like probably a stack of like 20 journals that are full that I’ve written in everyday since like 8^th grade maybe but I’ve just started writing like actual poetry probably 2 or 3 years ago”

PxP: What inspires you to write?

CN: “Mostly nature in the world around me so a lot of it is just like reflection and like trying to share and understand people but a lot of it comes from nature.”

Symphony of the Still Trees

the Trees are most honest with you than any other living thing will be
they tell their secrets in between the sultry sounds of dusk falling
so hot
sticky
sweet
everyone is liberated from their fingertips
their hair follicles
and too busy becoming dust again to hear the
faint whispers of the forest
under blood rushing

they sing their praise in golden halos around the sun
in futile attempts of touching every leaf
falling
alter before it becomes what we all mistake for dirt
glory sounds come with the morning
louder than the splitting remembrance of dreams
one day you may have the itch to
close your eyes
go back to sleep
and forsake the morning
ever longer suspending the inevitable and self-righteous belonging to the Trees

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins

everyone tries to befriend death before it’s theirs to behold

to decide your own date with death
a noble and lonely curse
Alobar
a thief of nothing but time
liquified in holy matrimony
and sailed away on noah’s ark
to forever seduce the shadows of nymphs succumbed to the ocean floor

the secret to life is not a secret or a prayer but a smell
indistinguishable
the un ingestible
fateful hand of fate and all that follows

destinys ancient tear drops falling
on bodies of bloody vagrancy
warmed over the same fires that were supposed to  consume them

those who nearly escape fate and time interchangeable
come back to remind us
in frozen living creatures
not nearly as devoted as day
to the endless cycle

what infests us in the fall
turns us purple in the winter
back to puddles in the spring
hoarding rainbows in the summer
clinging dearly to the sweet serenity of dirt
only to be born back unto a dying tree

escape the wind not by becoming but by politely declining

the eternal cycle of self damnation and all of its woes

ALLOW FOR THE POLLINATION OF YOUR MIND (FLOWERS)

no matter how brief
the sacred suspension of time may be
allows for the formation of a devoted flower
deserving of praise
between concrete shattered dreams

the Flowering of human consciousness
the (re)birth of our predestined floral consciousness
is challenged by the envy of these blood, flesh and bone desires
bringing us closer and closer to the

ever

dying day

there may be more similarities than one between these creatures of habit, need, and waste
and the gentle unencumbered children of dreams
in a language greatly misspoken
should we beg
not for the illusion of forgiveness,
but for the illumination of Truth
in light of our most UNnatural desires

reach through the rivers of your minds collective fate
to find these thoughts absenced by sound

(remember

through the eclipse of long forgotten memory:

we are all the youngest children of dreams

unknown siblings of the same One)