This poem was written on 1/09/2026 while reflecting on the thin space right before everything tips. The moment when your body knows something is about to break, even if the world around you sees nothing. I was referencing the stopped BPD splitting with controlled breathing and willpower. However, this could reference any different type of mental illness that sends you into something outside of your normal.
For me, this moment often comes with a strange laugh, or a quiet giggle. The nervous echo before a split, a spiral, or a panic surge takes over. It is the warning bell my nervous system rings when I am about to lose myself.
Instead of letting it crash, I try to let it breathe.
The more I do breathing work. The more I work at it, the more successful of a tool it is, for me.
That breath is not always peaceful, though; it is a decision. A small, private act of staying true to me. The kind no one claps for, because no one even knows it happened.
This poem is for anyone who has ever held themselves together in silence, who felt the wave rising and chose, just for that moment, to stay upright.
Explore Because I Was Prompted, Axton’s unique poetry prompt journal. Here he blends 17 poems with the creative prompts used to create them. To inspire writers, poets, and creatives. Perfect for deepening your craft and sparking new ideas.
About This Prompt Journal
This collection was curated from Axton’s personal prompts, and others he collected across Instagram, Pinterest, and other creative spaces. Writers, poets, and creatives can use these to build ideas, create new works, or add to Axton’s pieces. Making this e-journal both a tool and a space for collaboration.
Why You’ll Love This Collection
Inspiration for Writers and Poets: Each prompt pairs with a poem to spark your imagination.
Creative Reflection: Engage with your memories, emotions, and personal stories.
Flexibility: Use prompts to create extensions of Axton’s work, entirely original pieces, or part of a future series.
Skill Building: Strengthen your creative voice through guided practice.
How to Access Because I Was Prompted
You can read or purchase this collection on multiple platforms for maximum accessibility.
Beginnings and Endings is my first self-published poetry collection. A staggering 93 poem journey through the sparks, mess, and echoes of relationships. From first connection to final silence, these poems hold space for hope, hurt, and unapologetic vulnerability.
Whether it’s a love that healed, or one that hallowed. These poetic works explore the real, bittersweet truths that live inside us all. Written from a transgender man’s perspective, while capturing beginnings, messy middles, and the inevitable endings with honesty and grit.
Themes and What to Expect
Relationships: first spark, deep connection, heartbreak, reconciliation
Emotional journey: hope, grief, self-discovery, reflection, mental health
One of the most sound pieces of advice I’ve seen in recent graffiti. Two other examples of good advice in graffiti in the post below. I found all three here today in Wheeling, West Virginia at the Overlook Castle.
This collection captures Days 13 through 19 of the 100 poems in 100 days creative challenge I am participating in. These entries were written daily. They were just shared as a batch in one post. The first 12 were shared daily as solo posts. These poems reflect a week of observation, reflection, and response. Each poem is a moment in time. You’ll find poetry that is personal, political, and more. I am documenting memory, grief, injustice, and the search for clarity and home.
While these seven poems are shared together, the writing continued daily,as it will continue until day 100. Future entries (Days 20–100) will be posted either individually or in small batches, like the first 19. This will keep readers present and on their toes as to when new daily poems are coming. The ongoing rhythm mirrors life itself: unpredictable, urgent, and evolving.
Each poem is paired with a Poet’s Note to deepen the context. It reflects on its inspiration. It draws connections between the personal and societal, and the intimate and the global.
Day 13 – 1/2/2026
“Rhyme”
Ukraine
Palestine
Venezuela
There is no point in trying to
Rhyme
Nigeria
Iran
Sudan
Their lives the cost at the end of the billionaires
Riches
Oil, minerals
Human greed
The West strikes again to save the Middle East
American propaganda machine
Poet’s Note
In the shadow of global conflict and the Christmas night bombing in Nigeria. This poem names the human cost behind headlines. Revealing the repeated cycles of violence. Then highlighting the ways ordinary people bear the burden of power, greed, and war. This is poetry that challenges the systems that profit from oppression. Naming places directly like Venezuela, Iran, and Sudan. I want to mention this poem is about all the places affected by these systems, and the people impacted. It is a call to witness what is often ignored.
The Top level View and the Rolling hills in the distance at Mount Wood Overlook in Wheeling, WV.
Day 14 – 1/3/2026
“Warm Places, Cold World”
I am blessed to have
many warm places in a world so cold.
My home
My car
The woods
places I feel safe
Yet when the lonely days are too rough
My partner’s arms
My mother-in-law’s couch
Or friends with shared spaces
Are places I am blessed to know
On this winding road, finding pieces of home
West Virginia roads once led me there
now the memories of
the place are
scattered
everywhere
Curating a place for me
after searching eternally
Poet’s Note
Written 1/3/2026, this poem reflects on the fragments of home we find throughout life. Safety, warmth, and belonging can appear in unexpected places, from people to landscapes to fleeting moments. Home is not just geography; it is collected through memory, connection, and care.
View from the top landing of the spiral steps at Mount Wood Castle.
Day 15 – 1/4/2026
“The Same”
Swipe.
F
l
i
c
k. M o .
v e
The days on the calendar float on by,
though they always stay the same.
R l o l.
T u r n. Change….
The numbers on the clock, never showing a repeating moment….
Though, they always stay the same.
Fast-forward or reverse, wherever you choose to press play.
World history or familial ties through bloodlines, cursed or blessed, they never look the same.
Though, they always stay the same.
Who is to blame for never making the change?
Those in history? Or Those of us living through its repeats?
Poets note
This poem traces the rhythm of repetition, the illusion of movement in days, clocks, and history. Swipe, flick, turn… As we do on our phones. Then we press play, like a movie, thinking we are deciding, thinking we are moving. Yet so much is actually left unchanged. The poem artistically depicts the movements we make on our phones. As well as showing how we rewound, fast forwarded, and pressed play on VHS tapes, DVDs, and more. Using both depictions to show time and how things change yet stay the same.
The lines stretch, scatter, and move on the page like our attempts to grasp time and meaning. Showing how moments pass, events unfold, generations bear patterns… Yet in their echo, the sameness persists. Asking quietly and plainly: when cycles repeat, who holds the responsibility? Those who lived before? Or those of us who carry the weight now?
This piece is both a mirror and a map. Acting as a reflection on history’s repetitions and the intimate, daily rhythms we navigate. It acknowledges the frustration of watching patterns endure while searching for change. Poetically playing on tension between inevitability and agency.
Axton a Transgender man posing next to graffiti reminding people to chose love over hate.
Pause here with me for a moment.
Did any line, feeling, or piece here stick out or to you more? I’d love to hear the details regarding which and the ways it resonated. Think about it and tell me in the comments?
or
At the end of this post you could comment a line, quote, or your full poem. Poems from the past, that align with these daily themes are welcome, as well as those written this week.
Any and all interactions or additional conversation pieces and starters highly appreciated. We enjoy reading your creative pieces, input, takes, reviews,reflections, and all the interactions in between.
Day 16 – 1/5/2026
A micro-poem on Grief
“Goodbye, Breathe”
I wish you had
thought to
breathe your quiet
warmth inside of me
one last time
before you said
goodbye
Poet’s Note
Today’s micro-poem captures grief and the longing for a final shared moment. Its brevity emphasizes the weight of absence, memory, and the lingering warmth of those we lose. Even in few lines, poetry can cradle the unspeakable and hold the echo of those gone. This was written in the shadow of grief after the loss of my mother. “Goodbye, Breathe” works at showing how some poetry is adaptable to any type of loss. Here I leave the meaning up to interpretation by the reader yet fully convey my feelings.
A Cute Graffiti Art Cat to Brighten the Post.
Day 17 – 1/6/2026
“Circus and Cake”
Downplayed self‑care in society
Overworked, under‑lived lives….
Romanticized
You work a hundred hours a week…
Just to spend all your time off feeling weak.
You barely scrape by.
Yet you have the mind to brag
and boast.
Making the hours you waste working
a competition to make yourself feel better…
No matter how much you try to… disguise it
it’s true
They made the working-class slaves
Then we thanked them for it.
They took away the circus and the cake. And instead of throwing a fit…
we blamed each other for it
Poet’s Note
“Circus and Cake” a poem reflecting on distraction through comfort. Small pleasures and fleeting indulgences that can pacify people while systemic exploitation continues. The stolen “circus” and “cake” are symbols of joy and entertainment. Throughout history, government agencies have used bread and circuses to distract their citizens. Panem et circuses was the Latin term used to represent this. The poem highlights governmental distractions and questions readers in different ways.
What has changed in our society? We had our stability (bread, cake, food, etc) and entertainment (circus, distractions that are fun, etc) all but fully removed. Yet we remain distracted. Why?
View of West Virginia, Ohio, and the Ohio River from the Overlook In Wheeling, WV.
Day 18 – 1/7/2026
Prelude: Axton curated the piece below while sitting at Mount Wood Overlook in Wheeling, West Virginia. Also called the Castle Overlook or just the Overlook. At present time tourists and locals alike use this overlook for an array of things. Most visitors come for sightseeing, unique photography, and outdoor hangouts. Others are drawn to public murals created by the local Wheeling Art Commission. Urban-exploration also tops the list of reasons you’d find an individual visiting the overlook.
But, for creative and emotionally driven humans, this paces exists to reminisce. Grief, childhood memories, or even a longing for home. Add to that the need to unpack big things in equally big spaces, that call us places like this. Last and maybe most important a giant serving of nostalgia. And now you can truly see why the overlook fits for these needs, as well as some mischievous happenings too.
“Cremated”
And every time I come home,
it’s a little
lonelier
than the last.
And every time I come home,
I wonder if
somehow
home
has picked up
and left.
Or did I?
Was the place I knew turned to crumbled remains with you? Cremate my home right along with you?
Ashes to Ashes,
Dust to Dust,
I still
just
collect
the
pieces
along the way.
My torture evergreen.
Poet’s Note
Written at Mount Wood Overlook in Wheeling, WV. A poem that explores home, memory, and loss. Sharing Feelings of grief and loss I feel when returning to the place I grew up since the death of my mother. The loss of feeling at home since she was cremated, “Cremated” poetically describes the cremation of home. The overlook, was built in the 1920’s. It was originally supposed to house a doctor before life drama got in the way of completing it. The structure now watches over absent families and scattered histories. The overlook castle (as locals call it) also showcases wicked graffiti, which doesn’t stay the same long. Here home is collected in fragments, in memories, and in what remains. For some reason, even when it feels lonelier each time I return.
Day 19 – 1/8/2026
“Vigilante Justice”
Let’s start a fire inside the United States,
figuratively, of course.
We can start by using oppression,
hatred, and bigotry
as gasoline to fuel this movement.
Melting down ice into nonexistence.
Covering the country’s soil in fluids
other than
spilled blood
from darker complexions,
the first time in a whole fucking year….
The presidency ….
has three entire years to go, still ….
Scariest thing, if you ask me,
the collective inability to remember how things were before…
When they were just a minute fraction of the pie closer to equality
We do not want… Venezuelan oil.
We do not want to overthrow……
Greenland.
Mexico.
Canada.
We want education, affordable healthcare, workers’ rights,
equality for all
Now
OR vengeance for each and every infraction.
Come tomorrow and on.
A vigilante is what we need….
And a vigilante I may soon be.
Poet’s Note
A piece that uses fire as metaphor, representing accountability and resistance rather than destruction. It critiques complacency, systemic injustice, and the erasure of memory. Then it names the need for moral vigilance and collective action. This is poetry that refuses to stay passive in the face of oppression.
These seven days trace a path through personal and global reflection, grief, memory, and resistance. They examine cycles of oppression, moments of warmth and home. The tension between complacency and action lives in these poems. From international injustice to intimate loss. Stolen joy and moral awakening find their homes here. Poems as witness, critique, and call-to-action. Each a fragment of a daily personal creative contest. Join me in observing the world and responding with honesty, urgency, and reflection.
I feel like everyone in the world could use this advice right now.
Please feel free to share this post with anyone you think would benefit from reading these poems in any form. Have an artistic or poetic friend? Share this with them and challenge them to create one poem or piece of art every day for 100 days.
Before you go, are you interested in supporting the creative dreams and goals of a small-town Ohio poet? Axton N.O. Mitchell the voice behind Poeaxtry is a transgender man with a neurodivergent thought pattern. He has a black belt in being a mental health warrior, he earned through lived experiences. The digital creations Poeaxtry by Axton designs always align with advocacy. Axton ensures Poeaxtry and the prism always keep community care centralized.
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Poeaxtry Links. Portfolio. Random day. A different day. This book feels relevant to the last 19 days. Thank you for reading Poeaxtry by Axton’s original poetry.
More surprisingly sound advice from graffiti in Wheeling, West Virginia.
There’s a temptation every January to pretend the year before didn’t bruise us, to slap a fresh number on the calendar and call it rebirth.
But real change doesn’t work like that. It carries memory. It carries consequence. This poem doesn’t ask 2026 to save us. It asks us to arrive honestly, eyes open, grief acknowledged, hope still breathing.
After you read this poem, comment something you wanna manifest for the year of 2026. Or you could tell me if your manifestations send something like mine all input is appreciated.
2026
As we enter 2026,
we need not forget
the implications 2025
had on our lives.
Set our course and stay afloat.
We cannot begin to give up hope.
Dry our eyes from the tears we cried in 2025.
Forget fear in the coming year.
This year we will lead
the majority of humanity
to see each individual equally
for the first time in human history.
Poet’s Note
This poem exists in the space between grief and resolve. It refuses erasure. 2025 mattered, for better or worse, and pretending otherwise only weakens what comes next.
Writing this felt less like predicting the future and more like setting an intention that requires participation. Equality isn’t automatic. Hope isn’t passive. Both are choices we make out loud.
2026 isn’t a reset button. It’s a continuation. What we carry forward matters just as much as what we leave behind. If this poem resonated, it’s because you already understand that change doesn’t come quietly. It comes when we decide to see each other fully and act like it.
Share this with someone who feels like they need permission to hope again, so they can manifest alongside us, not alone.
Day 11 sits in that quiet space where observation turns into truth.
This poem doesn’t shout, it asks. It looks at nature and humanity. Then it waits for the reader to notice the gap between how we praise difference in the wild and how often we reject it in people.
This is a piece about human difference, natural diversity, and the cultural resistance to letting others exist as they are.
This is a window to the inside of humanity.
Before you scroll, think about this: Where have you admired difference in nature but struggled with it in people?
Where has it been done to you?
Are you open to changed thinking?
Let’s talk in the comments!
Beauty
What do waterfalls and the prints on your fingertips have in common?
There’s no two exact matches anywhere in life.
The flakes of snow prove the same.
If nature relishes in difference,
why can people not do the same?
Historically, when someone is different,
we as humans can’t handle it.
Instead of losing your mind,
embrace the beauty in human difference
as you do in nature.
Poet’s Note
This poem exists because difference is celebrated selectively.
We romanticize snowflakes, collect stones, hike through forests, and marvel at how nothing repeats itself exactly. Then we meet a human who doesn’t match the mold and suddenly uniqueness becomes a threat.
“Beauty” is a reminder that difference is not a flaw, it’s the original design.
Nature never asked permission to vary.
People shouldn’t have to either.
Difference is not new.
It isn’t dangerous.
It isn’t something to correct.
The problem has never been uniqueness.
The problem is discomfort, taught, inherited, and rarely questioned.
If we can learn to admire the unrepeatable patterns in nature, we can learn to protect them in people.
If this poem made you think of someone who has been made to feel “too different” or “too much,” share this with them.
Simply to remind them that they were never the problem.
Day 7 of my 100 Days of Poetry series is about intentional creation, refusing extraction, and building space for voices that are too often talked over, repackaged, or erased. This poem speaks to the act of creating with purpose, not as spectacle, not as trauma currency, but as documentation, resistance, and invitation. It is about community built with care, not permission, and about forward motion that actually follows through.
Creating Curated Change
I don’t write of
trauma
pain
life’s unseen stains
to pass an emotional buck
Not one to complain
Unseen pain outside of me
I do not
have not
will not
seek unsolicited help to
shoulder a burden that
no one can claim to own
outside of me
I weave words willfully
immortalized receipts
capturing points of view
perpetually prevented from
participating in literary and artistic
mind meetings
Expect me to be
never
asking permission
from a single soul
and
stopping for the same
Current and future people like me
need opportunity to see
other people’s perspectives
that actually relate
consciously communicate
No more stolen
minority
makers
manifestations
through creation
Curated creative community
No more requirements of
status
education
plausible politeness past
wreck the walls that gatekeep creation
Forward action, curating change,
no more complaining with zero follow-through
Creative creatures collect, creating change
Poet’s note
This poem was written as a refusal. A refusal to create for consumption alone, to package pain for approval, or to dilute language for comfort. The “curation” here is not exclusion, it is intention. It is about protecting creative spaces from extraction while still opening doors for those who have been historically shut out.
The idea of “immortalized receipts” speaks to indie publishing minority works both mine and community, to proof of lived experience, and to the power of language as record. This piece centers community that creates with accountability, forward action, and care, rather than performance or proximity to status.
“Creating Curated Change” is a declaration of practice, not theory. It challenges the idea that creativity must be polite, credentialed, or palatable to matter. Instead, it argues for community built through conscious communication, lived perspective, and actual follow-through.
This poem invites readers to consider not just what they create, but how, why, and who is allowed to participate. Change does not come from endless critique alone. It comes from collective making, from tearing down the gates, and from building something better in their place.
Day 4 of my 100 Days of Poetry series is about those quiet loops of thought, the small moments where we forget ourselves, forget our worth, or forget who we can lean on. Sometimes the fall we’re waiting for never comes, and yet the anticipation itself shapes us. This poem is an attempt to capture that suspended space between expectation and reality.
Profound Fall
Sometimes my brain
likes to play
these little games
Sometimes I forget
that I’m worth
anything at all.
Sometimes I forget
exactly who and when
I can call
I’m counting on the fall,
the metaphorical one
that has yet to come.
Sometimes I forget
that I was even
waiting for it.
It seems this year
I turned 34,
my feet have yet
to leave the ground.
Isn’t that profound?
Poet’s note
This poem was written as a reflection on self-forgetfulness and quiet anticipation. The “fall” is intentionally open-ended, representing both what we expect from life and what we wait for internally. Writing it was about noticing those small pauses, those moments of doubt, and giving them space on the page without judgment. It’s about the tension between inertia and hope, between standing still and yearning for change.
“Profound Fall” invites readers to sit with the internal rhythm of thought and reflection. It asks us to notice where we are grounded, where we hesitate, and how waiting can be as significant as action. Sometimes the profound comes not from movement, but from awareness, from pausing long enough to see where our mind and body meet.
Originally from Austin Dorthy now reside outsides of Dallas. She got her start in radio while she was still an undergrad at UT. Soon after she got bit by the entertainment bug and began appearing in TV series shot locally in Austin such as ABC’s “American Crime,” a Fox Pilot for “Urban Cowboy” among others.
Dorothy developed her first TV pilot, titled “Fourth Down” and incorporated her own independent production company titled Waymaker Women to produce TV, films and media targeted towards women of color in genre. Her latest project, is a book which marks her debut into the poetry arena. She notes her favorite project was her first TV Pilot that she developed. It was so special to her because it was the first ever project that I created; holds a special place in my heart.
How “Women in Red Rooms” was birthed
Dorothy Jade is a writer, storyteller and producer so she came from the world of entertainment. She decided that she wanted to publish and the best vehicle for her was poetry. It’s raw, instinctual and it just allows her to go after depths and uncomfortable truths that she has faced in acknowledging how rage has shaped her as a woman. Dorothy specifically created “Women in Red Rooms” to confront her own rage so that she could transform it into alchemy. Rage doesn’t have to be a crutch that puts you in this freeze state. It can become positive and allow you to heal and reclaim your power, if you allow it.
Deeper meanings
For Dorothy Jade, creation is all about autonomy, transformation and representing stories that primarily reach women of color. She knew that the end goal was to always develop worlds within genre that speak to women in a way they haven’t experienced before. Media and entertainment is simply a vehicle for me to expand my imagination.
Dorothy Jade wants “Women in Red Rooms” to become a blueprint for those seeking a safe room if you will in using their rage for their transformation. You can use your anger and turn it into something meaningful, creative or healing. Rage isn’t the monster, here. You’re allowed to feel in ways that may have felt like shame at one point.
Future Plans
Dorothy is going on the road with “Women in Red Rooms” via tour as she plans to produce a documentary behind this world. She can see it growing teeth; becoming a brand beyond just poetry but film, television and animation as well.
Links to Dorothy Jade socials, website: IG, twitter, threads @dorothviade and my site will be launching soon at dorothviade.com.
Well, I’m finally feeling like answering the a daily Prompt again. Today’s prompt is… Beaches or mountains, and tell us why. And you know me, I ain’t picking. I love them both, but for very different reasons, and at different times.
I’m a mountain man. I like to hike. I like to find destinations that don’t have destinations. If nobody was around to stop me, I’d probably hike farther than I do, just to see a lot less than I do. Ohio is sacred there’s something sacred in the quiet, in the moments between one peak and the next. Being out in nature, away from people, away from screens, schedules, and most important to me no one’s bothering me about being trans. I just exist. Seeing and feeling things sometimes that’s everything. Sometimes I touch a tree, just to touch it, and whisper “thank you,” like it’s listening.
I’m also not always trying to disappear into the woods. Sometimes I want to feel the sand between my toes, sip a mojito by the ocean, let the sun hang on my skin. And yet… even then, there’s that itch to pick up my tent, walk farther than anyone else, and not see a soul for a day or two. I’m the one who goes out over their head in the ocean when swimming, just because I can. The water is alive, and I want to be alive in it too.
I’ve been chasing both my whole life. When I lived in Vegas, every other weekend we’d drive through the mountains just to get to LA. The mountains, the hills, the twists and turns they made the journey alive. Nature isn’t one thing to me. Clearly the ocean is nature. The woods are nature. The mountains are nature. Unless it’s Florida. I ain’t never been, and I don’t plan on it either.
So which do I love more? I don’t. I love them both, for different reasons, at different times. The mountains feed my soul with quiet and effort. The beaches feed my soul with freedom and motion. Sometimes it’s the smell of pine. Sometimes it’s the taste of salt water on my lips or smelling it hanging in the air. Sometimes it’s just sitting still, sometimes I know it’s walking farther than I’ve ever walked before. Both remind me why I need nature at all, and both remind me why I’ll keep chasing it, wherever it is.
