Young Writers Society

2023 - midday moon
2022 - senior year
2021 - I can make going to denny's sad (not posting these)
2020 - spring waits for no one
2019 - sometimes I hear the bell ringing
2018 - the man beneath the lamppost
2017 - How to Deal with the Buzzards Poking at Your Eyes
2016 - these are the words that are an offense to sanity

march 15th, 2024 - you hate writing poems

sometimes your teachers
tell you to write up some poem
in the style of shakespeare,
about the themes of this story,
something that happened to you lately,
and you just know
you're going to stay up
late into the night
scrawling out crossing out
a couple lines at a time.
you hate writing poems.
sometimes it feels like witchcraft
that anyone can write one of those.
like, it's supposed to rhyme, right?
all the time. see, that's a rhyme,
uhhh, got to come up with another one,
repeating a word's too lazy,
internal rhymes would be nice
if you could manage one of those,
realistically speaking every line's
got to end with a common sound,
probably going to be simple words,
probably going to have to strangle
your word order a little bit
to fit a rhyme in, oh, that's another one.
and then there's syllables and stresses.
what are those? how you say words,
if you know how to say words,
if you know how to break words apart
into all their little sounds,
kind of hard when half the time
you've only read a word,
never heard it out loud,
that doesn't help you figure out
the whole rhyme thing either,
now that you think about it.
what stress pattern do you want, anyway?
iambic pentameter?
your teachers keep talking about it,
say it sounds kind of like
how people normally talk,
not that you'd know yourself.
whoops, you spent all the time
thinking about parts of words
and how to put them together,
but they have to be about something,
do you have any room for that?
honestly at this point
you might as well
just grunt a bunch
and write down what you think
that sounds like,
that's postmodernism or whatever.
ugh, your teachers wouldn't buy it.
just put down whatever,
as long as you try,
you probably won't get graded
too harshly for it,
but you hate not giving it your all,
you hate not quite getting something,
so here you are, still going,
putting so much time and effort
into this poem, and it sucks.

oh yeah going to swear a bit, fair warning

(originally written june 14th, 2023) - a most erudite sixteen-year-old

"you have an acquired way of talking"
oh god, was that a compliment
or an insult? at the time
I probably would've looked up acquired
and said, "oh, learned/developed,
I would indeed call my particular writing style
rather developed, sophisticated as it is
through all my years spent
honing my extended vocabulary
through consuming numerous pieces of literature
and inheriting the dedicated, meticulous patience
of a true Writer,"
and then carried on with my day.

it probably was a compliment,
because this person also said
they liked one of my poems,
and I think most people
would rather slap someone in the face
instead of doing something backhanded
and hoping that someone doesn't notice,
but god, so much respect to this person
if they were insulting me.
acquired! fancy enough and vague enough
it sounds a bit like
an author's style, something about them
that screams Them enough
for people to crowd around them
and throw money and awards their way.
but acquired just means learned,
not how it was learned
or if it was ever worth learning,
so it's just as easily
a great way to call a writing style
stilted, clumsy, full of itself,
has nothing to do with how people
think or talk or act,
an ocean of bullshit to wade through
in the hopes of finding
a raft, maybe even a shore,
any way to keep from drowning
in dictionaries and thesauruses.

march 26th, 2024 - human dollhouse

it's just, how did I even
spend seventeen years of my life
(I graduated high school early)
cooped up in that room?
I come back every now and then
and it's hilarious how much
it feels like a dollhouse -
here's the bed I can barely
fit in anymore without
yanking the sheets around
and throwing them off
while I'm trying to sleep;
here's all the books shoved into cabinets
and corners of the closet
even though half of them
are long outdated,
and I haven't read any of them in years;
here's all the cups I don't use
because I got them as souvenirs
and they can barely fit anything in them,
plus the stuffed animals I don't break out
because they'd clutter
what little space isn't taken up
by the lego sets I built once,
put away, glassed off
next to all the trinkets, odds and ends
I only ever looked at
when I was dusting them all off,
pretty sure mom does that now,
keeps everything the way I left it,
in case I might want any of it
or would just like it kept there
(and I appreciate that, I really do);
and here's that space that used
to hold a couch I'd spend hours
sitting on, living my life online
because my neighborhood was/is
full of retirees who barely
left their homes themselves,
I couldn't drive,
I didn't have anywhere I wanted to go,
that was basically my whole world
(I took that couch with me
to my apartment, so these days
when I come back,
I have to sit cross-legged
on the worn out gray carpet).

it's a bit rhetorical, but,
to answer my own question,
I didn't live in that room.
some shy, socially awkward, quiet,
profoundly anxious kid,
they lived there,
they could wall off the rest of the world
and write their little stories and poems
to their heart's content, but eventually
they put themselves out there enough,
talked to enough people, learned enough
that they wanted more out of life,
that fortress turned into a prison,
and the year before I went to college
I could barely talk to anyone, I moped
between my bedroom, bathroom, computer,
and the kitchen, sometimes outside
to bike the same few routes,
all that with a tiny bit of variation
day in day out forever,
bad posture wrecking my back
and the internet wrecking my eyes,
wanted to be anywhere else,
but didn't think I could
stand on my own anywhere else.

april 1st, 2024 - as it was



after a few attempts you immediately buried
under a few layers of folders
and didn't want to look at again
(can't blame you),
you made a few friends,
read their poems, and realized
wait a minute, a poem
doesn't have to rhyme,
doesn't have to have a stress pattern,
you can even play around
with the line breaks and lengths
and punctuation, drag out
whatever you want
for however long you want,
it doesn't even have to be serious,
you can write literally anything
and not get judged for it
because whatever, it's a joke.

so here you are,
taking those baby steps.
and god, you just started walking -
even if you're stumbling,
flailing your arms, crying,
I want you to keep going,
you have somewhere to get to,
it's not fair of me to come in
and make snippy little comments
like dad does (haha,
he records you running sometimes, doesn't he?
and shows you the recording
while telling you you
throw your hips/swing your legs out,
you're running like a *woman*,
that's why you're so out of breath,
you can't even do that right,
but I'm getting off track here).

it's just that, like,
what are you saying here?
it's satire, I guess?
something something
politics are ridiculous,
we just need to get along,
baby's first political theory.
but it's all too scattered, every line's
jumping off the previous one
and the previous one alone.
I guess I could see it working
as some over-the-top absurd
self-centered violent nightmare
about exploitation and control,
but I don't know, I can tell
you're copying futurama
and the closing lyrics
of modest mouse's lampshades on fire -
don't look at me like that,
I know it's in your mp3 player -
plus a couple in-jokes
I barely remember the context for
between you and friends I
haven't talked to in years.

and taking what you like,
mashing it all together,
that's all fine, especially
where you are right now,
but do you know what it means,
or does it just sound cool to you?
is that a snarky comment
about the electoral college,
or do a couple of those lines
line up for me to read them like that?
it's all a joke, but I'm not sure
what's supposed to be a punchline
and what's you saying something
you don't intend to.

april 2nd, 2024 - someone else driving you around

you sure like writing poems
about how craaaaaazy,
mad, insane, rambling, etc. you are,
or, worse yet, how crazy everyone else is
for, uh, living their lives?
playing whatever social games
they need to, maybe having a bit of fun
while they're at it. yeah,
make fun of them, random nobody kid
who wouldn't leave the house
if your parents didn't drag you
to the store/supermarket/restaurant,
when they're not busy
doing all the chores around the house
and giving you whatever you want
(at least, if it has a price tag),
you silver spoon coddled twit.

it's not hard to tell
where that's all coming from.
you wrote something a year ago -
a father's day card, I think?
that turned into some huge
words spilling all over the place mess
about how you felt like
you were losing control of yourself,
lashing out, panicking more,
and you were afraid at this rate
you'd fall apart without his help.
did you ever give it to him?
did he ever read it?
I honestly don't remember.
I sure hope you
squirreled it away somewhere,
because, like, you were 14.
that's puberty.
that's what puberty is.
okay, fine, most kids
don't obsessively check
the same few websites
to make sure they're
Up To Date on everything,
or hate clipping their fingernails
because touching anything afterwards
makes them want to throw up,
but that's something you can deal with
with some medication and therapy.

and you're afraid antidepressants
would take away your imagination,
would finally make you Normal
at the expense of making you Normal.
first of all, you don't even think
you've got much of an imagination
in the first place, so what
do you have to lose here?
give it a try, if you don't like it,
lose it, it's just some chemical
your body sucks at making,
it can't make you into someone else,
but it can help make you into
a you you're happier with,
and hell, van gogh made his
super wavy curly paintings
because he was inspired
by hallucinations he saw
from the meds he was taking.
maybe not the best example,
but I'm saying
you can have your cake
and eat it too.

april 3rd, 2024 - rolling in his grave in an alive sort of way


"ooooh, what if you could buy
a kid from the store?"
watterson did it better as a joke,
and that weird robot movie
did it better taking it seriously,
than you are in the corner
with your weird pretentious metaphors.
and I know you've read
through all the calvin and hobbes books
dad keeps on the shelves,
and I know you've seen
that movie on cartoon network
on the weekends sometimes.
god, I'm not telling you
you need to come up with something
completely, totally original -
in a broader narrative/poetic sense,
there's nothing new under the sun -
but at least stick to your lane,
or find a lane to stick to.

you're not a parent,
you don't want to be a parent,
you don't even want to be
in a relationship, don't you?
you keep writing about
these abstract couples,
a Man and a Woman,
basically identical because
you haven't gotten the hang
of creating characters
who aren't just you,
and they're together because
uh, that's just how it is,
that's how these things work,
just like your parents,
they're basically the same,
they've been together forever,
except for the part
where you're starting to figure out
they've always been their own people,
you go to your dad for tech advice
and your mom to proofread your stuff,
mom hates going anywhere on her own
or learning how to use the GPS,
dad's been working with computers
since before you were born,
mom drove tractors when
she wasn't even a teenager yet,
that kind of thing. but yeah,
at least they're happy together,
at least they chose
to be together,
not whatever mirror
you seem to want to
run into and
share your life with.

but oooh, you don't know
what your lane is. come on,
read a book, watch a movie, go online,
your parents basically let you
sit at your computer all day
with zero supervision
(they'll watch you everywhere else,
but not this time, for some reason?),
there's a big wide world out there
full of stuff that matters to you,
things you can actually talk about,
lanes for you to head down
if you'd only just
get out of the parking lot
and stopping letting someone else
drive you around
(boom, how's that for a metaphor?).
hell, even in that poem,
you've got a couple stories -
the way your brother bit the couch
to make his baby teeth fall out
for a couple quarters,
the time you drove your dad's car
into a tree the first time
you got behind the wheel
(has that happened yet?
if not, uh, spoiler alert).
just don't pretend to be someone
you're not.

april 4th, 2024 - the Big Profound

cw: swearing and references to car accidents

it kind of sucks
that I have to talk about *that* poem.
you're so proud of it,
it's your magnum opus,
not even the kind where you change your mind on that
the moment you write something new.
you weave together all these metaphors
to make some Big Profound statement
about how you shouldn't hide in bed
dreaming hazy foggy painfully incomplete dreams,
but instead pull yourself up and face
some combination of the world's bullshit
and the consequences of your own actions,
because hey, you might be insignificant,
but there's so much everything around you,
and sure, you'll only ever get to explore some of it,
which makes both of us want to beat our heads
against the walls and scream until we're hoarse,
but at least we can experience any of it at all.

but yeah, for years afterwards, even when
all these other poems fall apart in your mind,
you'll still, I'd still hold that one up
as a diamond in the rough, a miracle,
somehow in your mad libs writing style
you get your philosophy down on the paper
and make it beautiful to boot. not that
you'll ever read that poem again, just have
impressions, scenes you'll attach to some lines
and forget about the rest, until, of course,
I sit down and actually read the thing,
and whoops, it kind of sucks.

don't get me wrong - and I won't say this much,
so you'd better appreciate it - some of those lines
don't suck. I can see where you're going here,
between the alice in wonderland-esque cat
trying to drag you back to sleep;
and the mats woven out of deadlines
and expectations and goals and whatever else
getting worn down, getting patched up,
falling apart under the pressure of a fingertip;
and you drowning in some whatever it is, some desire
you can barely name, much less understand,
while the animals and trees and even the hills
make fun of you for flying too close to the sun.

that just makes me hate that poem more.
it has so much potential to be something,
but instead your metaphors are caught up
in some multiple lanes and deaths car accident,
just a tangle of metal and glass and bodies
blocking traffic both ways for miles back,
and you're so busy trying to pick the prettiest words
you forget what you were just writing about.
eating like a cat that'll never eat?
souls twisted into knots tied into beads?
ethereal? chide? can't you at least remind me
where I'm supposed to be, you keep jumping
between asleep and awake and hoping
that some transition words
at the start of each stanza
will tie the whole thing together.

maybe I should rewrite the whole thing,
make it into something I'm happy with,
but I'm not sure I even want to do
Big Profound statements anymore?
even the last couple poems I've written
feel a little shallow and vague
because they're trying to be
too much at once.
I think I'm better at picking apart
something I've noticed, tie it
subtly to something much larger,
not the other way around.

april 5th, 2024 - you had a favorite starting position on that track, it was the third or fourth one or something

I mean, as much as I call me me
and you you, it's nice to know
we've got some things in common,
like making weird jokes/sarcastic comments
with our younger brother.
it's a little funny imagining god
lazily copy-pasting clouds
on a blue canvas, a pinch
of blasphemy, but hey, we're atheists,
and that's our sense of humor.
not really sure if this was worth
writing about though, you know?
your whole poem feels like
an extended in-joke,
a bunch of these do, actually,
you keep tossing in places you've been
and stuff you've seen/done/said/noticed
whether or not the audience would get it
or if it fits with the rest of the poem.
hahaha, you're talking with him at that BMX track
you and your family go to a lot,
okay, BMX track is a little misleading,
it's a whole bunch of dirt ramps and hills
and curves that can barely fit anything
other than a couple of your very not powered bikes
and the like, five to ten year olds
who break out their helmets and fancy suits
and race a couple times a week,
there's announcers and everything,
because I guess this neighborhood
is bougie enough for that kind of thing?
and like, I feel a little weird
about kids doing competitive sports,
hopefully they want to be there
and it's not their parents shoving them
into something stressful, exhausting,
could definitely get somebody hurt.
and when there's apparently
some amount of money and status involved,
yeah, I don't know, I hope the BMX kids are all
doing alright these days.

uh, sorry, kind of wandered off there.
I just don't really want to talk about
the way you're treating our brother here.
like, are you implying mom and dad
are forcing him to come along with them,
are you implying he's a bit screwed up
for making some weird comment,
and you're somehow a genius
for your boring little followup?
seriously, you're being patronizing.
he's just saying what he wants,
doing what he wants, I've always
admired that about him, but clearly you don't.
hell, if anyone doesn't want to be here,
it's you. you hate some of those hills,
there's one where you really have to get going
to clear it, and if you don't,
you'll slide back down the hill
or even fall off your bike,
and it doesn't hurt much, but it's your pride
and not wanting to screw up
in front of your parents, in case they decide
to walk over there and explain in detail
what you're doing wrong and why
(they never compliment you, they figure
you can take care of that yourself),
so maybe you should stop projecting
and start dealing with your issues,
you've got a few to work through.

this might've made more sense for last year's napo, but



einojuhani rautavaara's cantus arcticus. it's a concerto for birds and orchestra, which in this case means someone in the orchestra is playing a tape of birdsong recorded near the arctic circle. I've seen people call rautavaara's music, uh, cold and alien. can't really disagree with that? he loves huge dynamic contrasts, enormous dissonant chords, all that business. but throw in some birdsong and the whole thing sounds, warm? comforting? like some big open park I can wander around in. have definitely cried a few times listening to it. no real reason to throw it in this thread, just felt like it.

cw: some swearing

april 6th, 2024 - I've been drunk exactly once in my life and it was kind of fun but pretty whatever

at the end of your poem
you leave a little note that says
"good God was I on drugs?"
and just, before I even
get into what the poem's about,
I want to say I'm not sure
why it's different
from any of the other poems
you've been writing, and also
do you know how insulting that note is,
both to yourself and other creators?
sometimes people do weird things
on purpose, to get attention
and/or provoke the audience
and/or make some personal,
emotional, metaphorical,
aesthetic statement, that kind of deal,
plus it's just hard
to make anything on drugs
because, you know
(wait a minute, no you don't),
drugs can screw up your senses,
your judgment, your thought process,
a lot of stuff that's kind of important
when creating anything at all.
can drugs inspire people? sure,
but don't make some shitty joke
that ignores why you, why anyone
came up with some piece of art.

which is all to say I have no idea
what you're trying to say here,
but I'm pretty sure drugs
aren't the culprit here. seriously,
so many of your poems are about
some kind of narrator/I running around
doing quirky and inexplicable things,
shouting things nobody would ever say,
and flirting with some sociopolitical issue
you don't even seem to understand.
are they supposed to be you?
you wouldn't have the guts
to tip over a glass of water,
much less cause a rockslide on purpose
because you're depressed
about newspaper articles or whatever.
you come across like a dickhead
smugly lording your obvious intelligence
over all the people unfortunate enough
to have to talk to you.
and fine, part of my problem here
is I'm not convinced you're saying
what I think you're saying. from what I remember,
you're pretty centrist, maybe left-of-center,
and I'm more aggressively leftist,
so I'm spending my time scratching my head
over if you're saying america is a police state
when that doesn't sound like a thing
you'd seriously believe? I don't buy it,
and the way you write
really doesn't do you any favors.
would it kill you to spell out
what you actually think sometimes?
that's rhetorical - it would kill you,
you're a coward.

april 7th, 2024 - self-inflicted tense nightmare

your patrilineal (father's father's father's father's etc.) line
only started to show up on records sometime in the late 1600s
in some scottish border town infamous a century later
for all the people bailing england real quick
to get married in a place where the laws
weren't quite so stringent. I'm not surprised -
it clearly wasn't worth keeping tabs on a bunch of peasants
living in a place that didn't even matter
until the 1700s made it the las vegas of scotland.
another line of yours somehow
came from your patrilineal clan again, or, at least,
a subclan that claimed descent from the leaders
of the clan proper, and those leaders said
they came from anglo-norman noblemen and scottish kings.
any documentation proving that? uh, I can't find any,
it mostly seems to be the clan's word, and that
depends on how confident the clan is feeling that day,
sometimes they show clan land grants and sometimes
they say our ancestors totally mattered before then, pinky swear.

and I could go through grave records and other people's research
trying to find royalty some 20-30 generations down the line,
but it's kind of hard for me to believe in any of this stuff.
a lot of people want to be descended from Important people,
think it's cool, think it makes them more Important by extension
to have some unbroken, provable connection, so I've seen
just way too many lies, wrong names, dates that can't line up,
links on a chain that snap when I brush them with a finger,
including several links you think you have. the good news is,
you know about common ancestors, right? anyone born in a place
before a certain date, as long as they had descendants,
is the ancestor of anyone with so much as a sliver
of their family coming from that place. and your family
is so confined to western and northern europe
we can push that date forward a bit, you're descended
from charlemagne, his children, his grandchildren, etc.
same for at least hundreds of millions of people,
and most your ancestors were peasants,
and there's not a specific line you can point to,
but maybe you shouldn't care so much?
it's kind of impressive that you have
that much of a family history at all,
that you can piece together as much as you have,
and I'll be real here, your ancestors
weren't exactly great people, and maybe
you don't need to know who all you're related to.