Young Writers Society

Thanks guys! I'm using my mobile now, so excuse the formatting please. Will fix later ^^

There is little in life
better than a simple walk
in the dying light of day or
the cooling twilight of night.
None can deny that

there are few things worse than the awful
lurch in the pit of your stomach
when your step falters mid
fall and your world is rocked by a sudden
lacking

The old staircase at the front of my door
scrunches its nose at me, gathering its folds
close in suspicion, but I do not want
to take the given path. I prefer the hidden spaces
beneath it that spiders call home
in whisperspun secrets.

The old whore Esmeralde lies on the creaking bed,
hips surging beneath the weight of the man grunting atop her;
she notes carefully the pleading look in his eyes,
the thankful lust. She is surprised that her inner places
manage still to pulse with life, even
as it shudders in rejection.

It accepts only the sterile weight of gold.
In bits and pieces, collected through the detritus of men -
their furtive offcasts coloured desire
and guilt in equal measure

her heart forms, fragile and gleaming,
paint peeling in the dark. It is not as wondrous
as some claim, this heavy organ that weighs her down,
pinning her to the bed she so longs
to be free from.

Dark circles dot the cement, liverspots
on the saggy skin of the road. Follow the living track,
solidified in saliva, it creeps and crawls
on to the trains and buses, an unceasing tide,
as though scorning the separation of vehicles
and the streets they ride upon.

The sun falls and mommy says to make a wish -
folds of blue nestle around the gold star
and the sky blazes with the light of bygone ages -
keep it secret, she says, and when the sun rises again,
it'll carry you aloft

I sometimes wonder
if that's why it takes so long to dawn,
burdened with my weight and a thousand
thousand hopes and dreams, unfulfilled,
dragged in a flaming arc across the upturned
smile of the world, into the depths

The madmen on the bus raves at the sky,
behind the thin glass, so suffocatingly thick;
he screams because he is forever
in transit
and out of places to go

The house is perfect, lacquered wood shines
with the contented inner glow that comes
from being shaped by masterful hands,
long, white and lovely. Each stone fits perfectly;
the floor is tiled seamlessly, a gleaming sea with no tide.
But the house is empty and the hours stretch on
with lengthy shadows that multiply, ever searching,
aching for that word, that state called
home.

Wow, I didn't know my phone failed completely to format these >.<

But, ah, they're sorta viewable now.

Oh thank God! I can actually READ them now! I kind of just tried to read it (thinking it was poetry-prose) and then gave up. Thanks for the reformatting

I love the idea of a good walk, but I felt your last stanza did it more justice than the others, which seemed a bit...direct. Plain, obvious. I liked the imagery you evoked here:

The old staircase at the front of my door
scrunches its nose at me, gathering its folds
close in suspicion, but I do not want
to take the given path. I prefer the hidden spaces
beneath it that spiders call home
in whisperspun secrets.

I want to see this staircase! Oh, such a cute, snuggly image! 'I prefer the hidden spaces beneath it that spiders call home' was a good phrase, too, but I think the poem tried to get too cuddly at 'whisperspun secrets' so kind of killed the atmosphere a bit. 'Whisperspun' didn't work so well for me.

The next one on this page was...spooky. I didn't like having to read it in prose form at all. Here was a line that jumped out at me:

She is surprised that her inner places
manage still to pulse with life, even
as it shudders in rejection.

And I especially liked the villainous edge to this:

her heart forms, fragile and gleaming,
paint peeling in the dark

Okay, the third one on this page I felt was rather disjointed - I mean, all the images were powerful and vivid on their own, but when put together, didn't fit as neatly. The first stanza's image creates a horrid feeling of the streets:

liverspots
on the saggy skin of the road. Follow the living track,
solidified in saliva, it creeps and crawls

The second stanza appears far too bright and bubbly in the context of the previous one:

sun falls and mommy says to make a wish -
folds of blue nestle around the gold star

The third is reflective, mature, long-faced, wishing, wanting:

dreams, unfulfilled,
dragged in a flaming arc across the upturned
smile of the world,

And the last is insane:

he screams because he is forever
in transit

By the way, the above lines are also my favourites in that poem. I just think it needs more interlinking - or, actually (**she has a brainwave**), you could simply separate them out as: I, II, III, IV, so that they depict the same thing - the road - in several different ways.

The fourth one here didn't speak to me as much (but I love the word 'lacquered' in a poem), and I think that WAS your intended effect - we weren't meant to feel anything from having seen this house - because it's a HOUSE not a HOME. So...um, here's an awkward well-done for not inciting much emotion?


Keep it up, Jigster. And I like that you are experimenting with different characters, places and voices in your poems, and therefore aiming for a different effect each time. Makes it more interesting, I reckon

Um yeah, wow. That's pretty much exactly it, I was trying to mix it up a bit. And it was never meant to be prose! I'm sorry! Stupid phone lead me to believe it was at least in roughly the right shape. Seeing it as it was on the computer at uni made me die a little inside. >.<

With the first poem, yeah, I agree, the first stanza needs to go and the rest can be reworked. I dont think I knew what it was about until the staircase came to mind.

As for the third, I pretty much saw it as explicitly different scenes, though I could be more direct in outlining that. Thanks for the comments!

(Eek, I'm two behind!)

**

Lying down in ruffled bedsheets,
tossed by invisible storms,
thoughts refusing to die, a persistant
insistent buzz, buzz against the dark.
You edge toward the visible horizon
of your mind, knowing that the further
you go, the closer you are to shattering
revelations. Is it the tiredness that claims
you before the finish line, or is it fear
of unknown, unknowable truths?

Okay, I rewrote one of my earlier crappy poems. It's still a touch simple and obvious, but not as much as before and thus the crappiness is a little less, luls :

Idle Hands.

Simple joys matter; a walk
in the dying light of day or
the cooling twilight of night.
A glass of milk to cool the burning
dryness of your throat; watching
clouds hang in the sky, the nightshirts
of angels, drying.

But, so easily perverted;
the awful lurch in the pit of your stomach
when your step falters mid
fall and your world is rocked by a sudden
lacking; the heaviness of milk, the
latent lactation of mothers condensing,
curdling in your gut, anchoring you in
the present, locked from the respite
of sleep.

Having your careful observations, your
lackadaisical musings lost, beneath
a sudden downpour and the washing
begins, tarnishing us with the dirty
running water of divinity. Ware the
capriciousness of the everyday, that
carelessly fingers your soul with fickle
hands.

You duck your head
with a playful smile,
a quick flash of white,
gone. And I want to cup
your chin, lift it up -
don't hide that fitful candle;
let it shine.

Modern spaces confine, walls
close in, a messy whorl
of confused utterances, looped
and spun in a dozen different
colours blurred into the same
murky black.

No place to raise your kids,
these sly alleyways, so narrow
and full of spite, the trembling
angst of the awkward, unfulfilled teen
not quite sure of the source of his
constant dissatisfaction.

Misery breeds faster than we
can build infrastructure to cope
with its sprawling, insidious mass;
sacrifice social health care for the
sake of convenience and speed, with
which we hope to outrun misery's thousand
fingered neon hands.

Street lights cast solo halos,
a glowing discus, never thrown
and they come rushing out of the
alleys, the many mouths of suburbia
kicking and bashing at the base
of the pole -- it flickers, once,
twice, and is gone.

They hoot in gleeful mischief, run
to the next, happy in the darkness
that hides their individuality, every
single hope, dashed, every fear
unspoken amid the nameless dread
that comes with growing up.

It grows, thick and spindly and
not quite lush. It feeds, its depth
casting planes and angles
into sharp relief, depressions
become gaping craters; I am
haunted in its shadow. It will
remain, long after I am
gone.

*
XD. I'm going to title the above: My Beard

The moon pokes through the sky;
the reaper's sickle grins down
beside a mass of twilit blue riddled
with the eyes of the dead. Walk on
the sloping hills shaped in luscious
waves, the childbearing hips of our
mother, and know that we are watched
with covetousness.

Has the quality gone down massively or are people just ignoring this now? My poems are ronery

I'M STILL READING, JIGGITY!

Just thought you should know, even if I cannot comment on every single one of your cute little masterpieces (although, I must say, the first few on this page are a little more than 'bite-sized' - no complaints, there, though ).

I cracked up at the end of the 'My Beard' one, at the title - funnily, I didn't actually get it till you spelt it out to me, and that made it all the funnier. I don't know - I reckon you should keep the title at the bottom of the poem, if you can - and how'd that work, anyway???

I loved the latest one, too - especially the alternating lines (I dunno if that was intentional or not) of 'sweet, innocent phrases' and 'dark and deathly' ones - made for an interesting mix: (bolded are the sweet ones, italicised are the dark ones below)

The moon pokes through the sky;
the reaper's sickle grins down
beside a mass of twilit blue riddled
with the eyes of the dead. Walk on
the sloping hills shaped in luscious
waves, the childbearing hips of our
mother, and know that we are watched
with covetousness.

I loved the 'pokes through the sky' bit, though didn't much care for the 'reaper's sickle grin' (which I had to read a few times to digest); 'twilit blue riddled' was nice, stoo. And I ADORED the 'sloping hills shaped in a luscious' - the innocent alliteration going on there, as well as the fact you ended the line in 'luscious'.

Somehow, with all the dark and somewhat sensual, as well as the innocent imagery going on there, I didn't feel it really needed the last metaphor you tacked on there - mothers, childbearing, covetousness (which was too much of a mouthful) etc - but overall, I enjoyed it.

Just so you know, I doubt anyone could ignore or resist, rather, your cute poetry, so if they're not writing, I'd say they're maybe overwhelmed with other things?