Young Writers Society

cw: talking about parasitic wasps baby!!!!!! also swearing too, forgot about that

april 22nd, 2024 - gukesh won the candidates woooooo!!

not sure why you're talking about
losing chess games in the abstract
when you've got at least one in mind -
you built yourself a little fortress
zigzagging across the middle of the board,
most your pieces backing each other up,
and you were so proud of yourself
for shutting down your opponent's offense
until you realized you were also just moving pieces around,
you were too afraid to give any of yours up
and risk the whole thing collapsing,
and then it collapsed anyway when your friend
found a metaphorical crack in the wall
and smashed through it with a queen,
captured most your pieces until you were left
with a king and a handful of pawns,
like one of those fucked-up parasitic wasps
that paralyzes bugs, lays eggs in them,
and the little larvae feed on/break out of the bugs
like real-life alien. just thought you should know
that's a thing.

chess - good chess, at least - is more like
partners dancing, all coordinated and thought out,
sometimes flashy and sometimes reserved,
ready to switch things up
if the moment calls for it,
I guess capturing a piece would be like
one of the dancers having to take a breather
while the other does their thing? not sure
this is a great metaphor, actually,
but you get the idea. and you're personally
way too focused on that bishop on c4
when you should really care about
what the knight on f3 is doing
before whoops, your position's shot,
a bunch of your pieces are hanging,
there goes any strategy you might've had,
better luck next time.

and despite the way media in general
likes to prop up chess as this
Sport for Intellectuals, a sign of Genius,
you aren't just Good at Chess,
you can't just be Good at Chess,
that's something you have to work on,
being able to see the whole board,
guessing what your opponent's likely to do,
remembering your general rules and principles
and the many, many games you've played already,
maybe there's something about the pros
that makes them a bit better at playing chess
from the get go, but they still have to play chess.

and you know all that already, but it reads
way too much like you're over here
defending your intelligence, yeah,
you might suck at chess,
but that doesn't make you any less smart,
your friends, and him in particular,
like to talk about how
you're so mature for your age,
the tiniest bit of personal development
over the last year,
but just like that fortress
you can't let go of the idea
you have to be smart,
nobody would care about you if you weren't smart,
nobody would care about you because you're you.

cw: references to injury, death

april 23rd, 2024 - maybe ask around and find out if your home life is weird

I'm wondering if my bar's been lowered
so much over the last few weeks that now
you can hand me anything I can
at least follow along with, no words
I have to look up in a dictionary,
and I'm hard pressed to say anything about it, good or bad.
you've still got plenty of bad habits
lurking in the background - passive voice
("the impact force against bones...
isn't nearly strong enough to break them"),
metaphors you didn't intend ("pitch forward"
makes the main character sound kind of like a boat or car),
confusing word choice (how does he fall
into the bottom of the stairs?),
and you don't always know what you're talking about
(if he's rubbing his socks against carpet,
that's not going to "spray out" sparks,
those'll stay between the socks and carpet,
nevermind he can totally break bones
falling down the stairs, it's just that you never have) -
but you've got a decent theme?
some kid is messing around, falls down the stairs,
tries to put on a brave face because
he's a Dude, he can't show any emotion,
and his mom (?) buys that he's fine, he's a Guy,
that's just what they do, it's all very gender,
you're toying with the idea of being vulnerable,
or not being vulnerable, putting up walls,
social expectations even in the little stuff,
I can get on board with all that.

at the same time, ugh, I don't want to tell you
you should only ever write stuff
you personally experienced, like, most writers
didn't personally experience half the stuff
they're writing about, they're taking
something related they did experience
and mixing it together with research
and how they figure things would go,
but you don't do research
or know enough about the world
to do some guesswork,
really all you've got is yourself,
maybe start there, because damn
I can't get myself to care that much about your poems,
it's obvious you're making stuff up,
and not in a that's what fiction is way,
in a you don't get how people work way,
why is that mom calling her son a moron
under her breath, that's a bit much,
seems like there's more going on under the surface,
but nope, guess we're not going into it,
guess it's not a big deal.

and we as writers put so much of ourselves
on the page, we have to,
we're the ones writing all this,
so I'd rather you just lean into it, get personal?
I read amelia rosselli's commentary
on sylvia plath, amelia thought
sylvia's poems on the general Womanness
were her strongest stuff,
but the ones that caught my attention more
weren't her over the top holocaust
should she really be talking about this comparisons,
but her writing about herself
as a speck climbing around
on her dad's glassy-eyed, bloated, dead face,
and hey, when it comes to parents
you feel like you can't escape,
parents who ignore you except
when you screw up and/or show an emotion
and then they yell at you,
as much as you try to be a Good Kid,
you've got a lot to say there, don't you?
why don't you?

april 24th, 2024 - the poem where you admit you're a furry

I mean, it's a bit of fun
wearing a mask, right?
you can be some you
without the rest of you
getting in the way.
your family doesn't need to know
about your writing,
specifically the kind of
passive-aggressive potshots
you've taken at all of them,
your writer friends
don't care that much
about you gushing over
chemistry, classical music,
whatever else you've been
picking up these days,
like video game speedruns,
that group of people
aren't all that interested
in your poems or that whole
furry thing you're liking the sound of,
your furry friends (get it)
don't know you well enough
for you to dump on them all your
complicated feelings
about your parents and brothers.

and we're all people,
there's too much of us going on
behind the scenes for any of us
to ever get a good look at each other,
even get a good look at ourselves,
there's just too much of us for us
to ever be the real us
at one moment in time,
and none of that matters
most of the time,
so why bother?
there's nothing wrong
with a work you and a school you
and a family you and a friend you
and especially a personal you
all running around, as much you
as you need to do
whatever you need to do,
and yeah, sometimes you feel like
you could be a bit more honest,
yeah, sometimes those yous overlap,
yeah, sometimes you meet people
you have a fair bit in common with,
but you can break out
those other masks
when you run into that those people,
otherwise, eh, whatever makes you
comfortable in your skin, you know?
whatever gets you through the day.
it's all still you, anyways.

cw: fun relationship stuff

april 25th, 2024 - the thorn in you

nah, dude's more like a vampire
draining all the color from your face
(not that you had much to begin with),
leaving you stumbling along behind him,
writing the way he wants you to write,
working on the projects he cares about,
maybe sometimes he lets you throw in
some joke names for a setting
and piss him off a bit,
you think you're being cute
and you think he probably doesn't mind much,
in hindsight I'm not sure about that,
because otherwise, while he's out of his coffin
you're inseparable, his protege, muse,
defender, partner, whatever he wants you to be
whether you want to be or not. and yeah,
I'd rather not get into the details,
but you and I both know he's
desperate, lonely, has nowhere to go,
is it really that much of a reach to assume
he's looking to control what he can,
control who he can,
pick fights with everyone else,
and you, an actual child desperate
to be taken seriously, respected,
you're a pretty easy mark, aren't you?
you can tell me
it's fine, you can handle him,
your relationship isn't as bad
as I'm making it out to be,
but the way you're talking about him,
indirectly, but still, like he's some
misunderstood genius, lover
sacrificing himself to make you you,
you'd die with him, maybe for him,
that's all a bit intense, isn't it?
and in between the lines I can read
the ways he worries you, scares you
when he settles back in his coffin,
doesn't come out for weeks at a time,
and the times he makes vague threats,
screams in his text messages,
and all the little things you ask of him
it doesn't feel like he's respecting,
what is he telling other people about you,
about the two of you, are you happy with that,
are you happy looking at the road ahead of you
not sure if it keeps going past the horizon
or if it'll drop you off a cliff.

cw: swearing, gore, and death

april 26th, 2024 - snake river canyon

don't get me wrong, I love the imagery.
skin peeling off their faces clothes in shreds
shambling zombie skeleton dead daredevils
pulling themselves up lightning rods
to mock you hiding in your car
waiting on the storm to come,
but I'm not sure the narrative makes sense?
are you implying that they died like that,
or that you'd be a little less boring
if you ran around in the rain
getting pelted by hailstones and feeling
a tingling running down your body
a second before you get hit by a bolt?
pretty sure the point of doing stunts
is it feels cool as hell, looks cool as hell,
they might die, but if they've got the skill
to pull it off, well, they might as well try.
doing basically nothing and hoping you don't get your shit wrecked
isn't much of a stunt, frankly. when I think of stunts,
I go back a couple years to the stone walled balcony
and look out to the jumpers stretching their wings
and leaping off the bridge, zooming over the cliffs,
the waterfalls spraying into the air and disappearing,
the irrigated trimmed pristine golf courses,
the trees and sidewalks and afternoon crowds, and of course
the snake river snaking along on its snake course,
slowly and lazily in the shadow of the canyon,
and then the jumpers dropping like eagles to catch the river in their talons,
not even opening their parachutes, a straight shot down,
it makes me want to vomit, I have to look away,
but whoops, over there's the ramp evel knievel
tried to launch a rocket car off of, back to the river
and the jumpers floating down safely to the grassy field
they've cornered off. pulled it off like it was nothing,
that's cool as hell,
I'd do that if I didn't have to do that,
just strap me to someone else and let them do the work,
cross that off my bucket list.

and I don't think you have to choose
between a long life and an eventful one,
when it's your choice to make. god knows
life is full of surprises,
and most your lifespan comes from your genes,
how your body's built, what all it can handle,
you can help it out, but only for so long.
but hey, if everything lines up for you,
you've got that much longer on this earth
to explore, discover, take a risk here or there,
it's not like it's all super dangerous or whatever,
it's almost like tourism is a thing,
it's almost like there's people out there
who are willing to take your money
to show you around another country,
and would prefer you didn't die
because that might cut into their profits.
that's pretty flippant of me, but come on,
you have a hard enough time getting yourself
to go outside and walk for a little bit,
message that person you've always wanted to talk to,
you might think you can wait
for your comfort zone to catch up to you, but nah.
you want to know why I went back to the snake river canyon?
grandpa died. I'm sorry,
I can't shut up about it, I know I should,
I know everyone's tired of me by now,
but I still can't believe it,
I have to keep telling myself he's dead
because I thought I'd have time to say goodbye,
but nope! here we are! god, I didn't even
know him that well, and I've got a few problems
with him and grandma and everyone in gooding,
but he's just gone? that's it?
and that's going by the rest of my life?
I have to watch my friends and loved ones
die, leave canyons in my head for me to jump into,
not even sure if I can stick the landing,
especially if I don't have even a little closure?
how am I supposed to deal with that?
how is anyone supposed to deal with that?

cw: mild swearing

april 27th, 2024 - the book of intelligence

oh please. you say you're not saying
you're smarter than your younger brother,
but how else am I supposed to read this?
you think about math, the most Genius subject,
and he just can't wrap his brain around it;
you like classical, the most Genius genre of music,
and he likes pop, puerile filth for the sheepish masses.
it pisses me off that you're so close
to getting what Genius is, but you don't.
like yeah, there's a few things out there
we can measure - memory, reaction time,
pattern recognition, how good your senses are -
but those aren't in and of themselves intelligence,
it's how we put them together, intelligence
is more of a social idea than a biological one,
it depends on the time and place, how would you,
a city kid, handle doing chores on your cousin's farm?
how would you, an atheist who's set foot
in a church a grand total of twice in your life,
handle an easter service? yeah, pretty badly.
you're better off thinking about intelligence
like a book full of Things Smart People Do,
the canon of intelligence, if you will,
and if you follow the rules in the book
people will think you're smart, maybe
you can write a few lines in that book yourself
if other people look at what you do
and decide you do those things because you're smart,
it's basically a tautology, smart people are smart
because they do the things smart people do,
and they do the things smart people do
because they're smart. and you're such an anxious,
awkward, self-destructive mess you've convinced yourself
the only reason you have friends is because
you can do stuff for them, answer their questions,
help them out with their projects, otherwise
what good are you, you're just a disaster,
they'll just ditch you, leave you all alone.

but like, if you're not being emotionally honest,
if all you're doing is Being Smart, that
sounds like a pretty shallow friendship,
you don't have anyone to talk to
about the stuff that's bugging you,
and those friendships will probably fall apart pretty easily
when one or both of you decides to move on.
how about you stop trying to look smart
at get a personality instead?
like come on, I have a hard time believing
you see equations on the wall or whatever,
what are they even there for?
do they just look pretty to you?
and don't even pretend
you listen to much classical music.
you listen to a tiny bit of mozart and beethoven,
fifty million view youtube videos.
where's the bach or chopin or liszt
or czerny or strauss or mussorgsky
or rachmaninoff or prokofiev or scriabin
or bortkiewicz or lyapunov or stravinsky
or ravel or debussy or boulanger
or sorabji or bowen or britten
or messiaen or rautavaara or ives
or even the contemporary musicians,
adams or glass or saariaho or salonen
or eastman or part or finnissy or reich
or any of the other composers I remember
from a song or two stuck in my head
after some deep dive into google search results
and youtube recommendations, not because
I have anything to prove, look at me,
I'm so intelligent, no, I just like classical,
it's a huge and old as hell genre
people have taken in all kinds of directions,
I don't think I'll ever get bored of it.

I've learned a lot from my younger brother, actually,
and you should too. he knows what he wants,
ad he goes out and does it.
dude's been giving me detailed breakdowns
of severe weather forecasts and tornado paths
in between winning telescopes at raffles
and using computer programs to make mandlebrot sets
you could figure out if you cared enough, but eh, he's got it.
he's not the normal to your Genius, you're just
two different people doing different things,
me and him don't need to be smart to be happy,
you don't either, and if people think you're smart,
whatever, who cares?

cw: talking about chemicals and health problems

april 28th, 2024 - name the devil (teflon flu)

I can't believe dupont and 3m bothered to do studies.
like, they discovered and identified teflon,
then dozens, hundreds, thousands of other PFAS compounds,
they held the keys, so to speak, had the patents,
wouldn't even make radioisotopes for government scientists,
everyone else basically had to believe what the companies said.
I'd say dupont and 3m were worried about their employees,
maybe all the people learning to carry blocks of heated teflon
at arm's length to not get a fever were possibly
in some danger, could get sick, stop showing up to work,
beyond ethical concerns, that could cut into profits,
but dupont and 3m barely did anything about it, oh,
the government told us to tell you not to smoke near teflon,
oh, maybe pregnant women shouldn't work in our facilities,
otherwise it's fine, everything's lethal at a high enough dose,
PFAS isn't any more dangerous than salt, it's fine
we're dumping it into the water around our facilities,
all the research we've done says it's basically fine,
not like anyone else has had the chance to look into it,
not like we're multi-billion dollar corporations
who want the public to keep buying our stuff
and want you to keep working for us.
I guess dupont and 3m figured, worst came to worst,
it wouldn't cost that much to train new employees.
I'm kind of wondering if dupont and 3m were trying
to get ahead of the curve here,
set up some goalposts and figure out how to move them around
when the EPA eventually started looking their way.
like yeah, hundreds of people getting into coughing fits
and enlarged rat livers and passed out plane passengers
and hospitalized housewives and suffocated dead dogs
and miscarriages and birth defects are damning,
but whatever, make all those documents confidential,
hide them from the EPA, destroy them if we can,
maybe play around with some of our bad data until it looks okay,
keep saying nobody's found anything wrong with PFAS in 40 years,
it's safe, it's valuable, we're just going to stop
making some of our products, no need to worry about it,
we're just noticing fluorine in people's blood,
better to be safe than sorry,
and it's not like we have any control over what these chemicals
do out in the environment, that's not our problem,
how do you even know it's our products, maybe it's, uh,
some other company that has worse safety regulations,
EPA, please tell everyone that teflon is safe and always has been,
what do you mean you're suing us for lying to you,
oh well, at least it's just a fraction of our yearly profits.

long story short, it turns out that yes,
PFAS are generally inert, chemically unreactive,
but throw it out, burn it up, expose it to the elements
and whoops, turns out it can make all kinds of chemicals
that can get everywhere, stay in everything,
it's all still fluorinated, not an element nature
really knows how to handle in general, other than to let it
take up space, get in the way of everything else, all that.
and like, I really can't stress enough, even with regulation
and even it with being a crime, a bunch of executives
decided they'd rather poison the whole world than risk the possibility
of lower quarterly earnings, and because of that
basically everyone on earth has PFAS in their blood now.
the last person we could find who didn't was a corpse
frozen, basically mummified on some mountain in the Korean War.
and god, can you imagine how much worse things would be
if there wasn't any regulation at all? if nobody
could've pressured dupont and 3m to stop,
if it was even harder to do independent research without those companies
breathing down the researchers' necks,
if the victims couldn't even get financial compensation.
"oh, but the free market would've caught them eventually."
you're joking, right? you have to be joking,
who would have even noticed a problem in the first place,
especially not when dupont and 3m would've had the ability
to lie, antagonize, harass, threaten, sue,
buy out, takeover, kill that baby in the cradle,
it wouldn't even have been a free market in the first place,
a few CEOs would've just kept PFAS a company secret,
dominated the entire market, and hoped they died
before they had to worry about a little teflon flu.
and I can say all that in confidence because, y'know,
that's what those companies did in real life, the law be damned,
it's just that they got (eventually) (kind of) punished for it.
and it's pretty telling they tried to break the law at all, right?
why are we organizing a society where the profit motive,
the almighty dollar, matters at all, if it just makes situations
where all the people who have no problems killing everyone else
come into power?

Top US chemical firms to pay $1.2bn to settle water contamination lawsuits (The Guardian)

Makers of PFAS 'Forever Chemicals' Covered up the Dangers (University of California in San Francisco)

The Devil They Knew: Chemical Documents Analysis of Industry Influence on PFAS Science (Gaber, Bero, and Woodruff, Annals of Global Health)

DuPont workers smoke Teflon-laced cigarettes in company experiments (Environmental Working Group)

Watershed (Tracy K. Smith)

cw: suicidal thoughts

april 29th, 2024 - maresuke

april 30th, 2024 - carnival funhouse mirror

when you were a kid, you had trouble sleeping.
you stressed out so much over getting enough sleep
that you didn't, you stayed up for hours,
tossed and turned in bed with all the lights on
as dim as you could get them
so they wouldn't keep you up,
but they made you feel a little safer,
you didn't have to worry so much
about anything lurking in the dark,
maybe the light would scare off anyone deciding
to break into the house in the middle of the night
with just you awake (a totally normal thing
that'd definitely happen in a white bougie suburb,
but fears don't have to make sense),
and you'd try to distract yourself
imagining your stuffed animals protecting you,
your characters standing guard around your bed,
that all those real and imaginary monsters outside
were harmless, softies even, and when that didn't work
you'd read history books and listen
to the one station that played music that late
you actually recognized, pop music,
and there was this one song about a woman
inviting a friend? lover? whoever
to go on a, you always imagined a train,
in hindsight I don't think the lyrics
said what it was exactly, but sure, a train
heading up mountains and down valleys, and for some reason
you liked to imagine a version of that song
where you'd go back in time and meet up
with an even younger version of yourself
(past you's past you, this isn't getting complicated at all),
get on that train together,
and show them that hey, moving to colorado
is going to turn out alright,
dad's going to get that job,
you're going to live in a nice house,
you're going to be happy.
that usually calmed you down.

and you (current you),
between your classes and your hobbies,
you're too tired to stay up most the time,
but you're going to college in a couple months
and you'd be lying if you said
it doesn't feel like the world's ending,
you're going to be an actual adult
with actual adult responsibilities
like taxes and rent and student loans,
you forget to brush you teeth half the time,
how are you going to handle being on your own,
what if you don't, what if you screw up
and flunk out, go back to living
in this house with your parents forever.
and sometimes staring up at the ceiling
you hear the radio do a throwback, play that song,
and this time you imagine me opening the door
(knocking and telling you
it's me first, don't want you freaking out),
taking you by the hand, leading you
off to that train, buying a couple tickets,
and out the windows you can see
how the next few years will turn out.

I wish I could be there for you.
it wouldn't be all that reassuring -
you'd see valleys give way to a canyon
swallowing you in its shadows,
and the howling train spitting sparks
would almost crash into the river
at the bottom of the canyon,
and it'd go on for so long you'd sit there
gripping your chair closing your eyes
clenching your teeth bracing for impact,
but eventually you'd feel yourself
getting pulled back in your seat,
you'd open your eyes and see the pine tree forest
rising up to meet you, then waving you goodbye
as you'd head up into the sky,
your breath fogging in the air,
the mountains getting rugged, snowy,
and you'd swear as you pull in
to the final station that you can see
paths leading you up to the peak -
you'd at least know you're getting somewhere,
and I could set a hand on your shoulder
and talk you through it, I'm not one of those types
who'd keep things secret from you
for my own sake or whatever,
here's the things I wish I would've done,
here's the people I wish I'd avoided,
here's some tips and suggestions
about this whole living alone business,
I wouldn't exactly be me by the end of it
but we'd both be a bit better off.

but nah, I have to live with myself.
and really, I'm making you up a little bit,
putting you together from all the echoes
going back and forth along the canyon walls,
filling in the gaps with what I know now
so I have someone to give advice to,
shout at, feel for, live through,
I'm pretending there's a you at all
like you aren't just me, like I haven't shouting
and picking up on my own voice all month.
don't get me wrong, between all the stuff I didn't say,
all the emotions and relationships I don't remember having,
a lot of this doesn't feel like me, it's like I'm
standing in front of one of those carnival funhouse mirrors
stretching me out, squishing me down, spiraling me,
but it's still my reflection.
long, complicated poems that demand
maybe a bit too much from the audience? check.
social commentary that may or may not suck? check.
huge vocabulary and weird word order
I have to remind myself
I need to keep reigning in? check.
I'm doing it all on purpose,
my poems are all a bit disorienting
because the way I think is a bit disorienting
and I want to write like I think like I talk like I play piano
like I do everything else in my life, I want it all to be me,
but it's a bit hypocritical to get mad at my younger self
when the biggest difference between us
is what we're trying to say, how, why.
it's almost like I can cut myself some slack
and admit I was - will always be -
a messy, contradictory person,
I was trying so hard back then
to get outside of my comfort zone,
and it didn't go that well,
and maybe I should've taken more advice
from the people around me,
but all the choices I made
got me to where I am now,
so that's something.

oh also some stats, for funsies

total length: 1,993 lines
average length: 66.43 lines
longest poem: carnival funhouse mirror (134 lines)
shortest poem: your parents don't even know you write poetry, do they (38 lines)