Young Writers Society

1.
i am worth your time

collecting and collating
the hands and feet
that move so swiftly and sure
and
we have come so far
and learnt so much
you would think it applied
to the thick black paint
on your digital watch
instead i see our few steps
resetting

am i worth your time

2.
in that moment
a clerical error
sifting time and
and
and
our lips found each other
pressed and unpressed
in the moments
(always stolen)
unidentified

3.

The church bells ring
Thick in the summer heat
That should have left behind.
It carries weight,
Each toll sitting on the air,
Holding out to the suburbs
In welcome (and command).
I press my back to the plinth
And feel vertebrae vibrate,
Leylines sinking into the deep earth.

4.

Today the gale thrums
underneath the awning
and through the house,
sudden and abrasive
we revel in it,
faces turned we breathe deeply,
tasting the heady rush
with open smiles.
I ask if we are back by the sea;
thinking of the great expanse
dipping through the glass sliding doors
and the whales flicking in and out
as they migrate further south.
Instead the clouds gather
threaten rain
and never follow through.

5.

the night closes in
deep and dark and hungry
i dont know if what i offer
is enough to appease
or just enough to flounder.

6.

I welcomed this;
bleak, the bottom
of this
absolution.
Your palms'
deep lines collecting
a net beneath my name
[i don't own
your mouth
or the words
that come from it]
clutched by you
I am corporeal,
the weight of my heels
sinking into hot dry sand
[stuck]


7.

paroxysm
it felt unfair, the way the world
shuddered and caved,
splitting the sense of self
we had so categorically
stolen
We could grasp at it,
the whisper touch right before
and then after
everything we wanted to keep.
It felt unfair,
the slick slice
between collarbone and jaw,
muting our dissent
as it was spoken.
it felt unfair
but probably it
wasnt


8. Written with @Meshugenah

tales from the plague years:
six years slipping past
uneven beats, flashes of clarity
spun together in increasing blurs
we could find it here; peace,
the cluttered awareness of
memory, unclouded by reality

9.

i feel excessive
parts of me just dont
f i t
together my limbs are
jarring and outlined by shadow
that connects at joints
(the ones which wont work
like other pulleys do)
whose hidden folds retain
the push to pull of shattered neurons.
don't give up
don't give up
dont
tell me what to do

10.

I am culturally adrift.
Sinking here
I find myself
Struggling to breathe;
Salt baths between the gums.
The past is unreachable
And undesireable -
Backward is below, underneath,
A global mass of voyeurism
And "knowing what we do now".
I claw toward a future that doesn't exist
Until i have met it

Time does not care what i want,
Who i am will not carry the day
And so i wait and change
And wait and change
And wait
To change

11.

The colour streams toward the window sil, droplets merging into the deluge as the clouds open up again. At Christmas we could not have imagined this. The heat sank deftly into our bones, our tendons creaked with thirst and the dark bloom of ash coughed heavy on our lips. Green bursts forward into tomorrow where we can't forget: our land was made for burning.

12.

What is your weakness now?
Does it find you at night?
Can you name it?
We could play 20 questions
And you could draw me pictures
But I'm not sure you know
What follows you in the street,
What keeps you awake,
What name you gave
Your shadow
Last time you met
And where it went
When you blinked.

13.

Your favourite poems are ones which you would never write. Could never write. You don't have the words or worlds or impetus. That is why you love them. Writing poetry is about striving. More so than novels or non fiction, poetry is inevitably about locating. Of finding. An act of defiant desperation - connection through shared experience which can never quite complete. Poetry is empty. It yearns and asks for nothing. It accepts and then throws away. The poets we love cling desperately to a moment of language, fleeting expression, which inexplicably ties us in. It succeeds in the moment, which is all we ever have.