Young Writers Society

Library

Your style doesn't intrigue me,
we stand like books;
Brace cover to back cover to back
and threaten to topple over like them too
I will keep my pages tucked from your back
with my cover, and you will keep yours safe with your back
possessive like a hound with a bone, refusing to let go
gnawing, cracking, licking, suckling, you have your style
I have mine.

Sometimes I look for my lost pages
the ones who fell out because the glue of my spine
was weak enough to crackle and flake like dried milk.
I wonder if they're in you, stretching your mouth full
like an apple chunk caught in your teeth refusing to enter
a cat faced with a bathtub clinging to the rims it can find

Maybe my pages are making you look foolish
or old and used like a penny book.
If I found them in your leaves,
I don't think I would like them,
I'd reject them, think they were nothing new
say "I'd written that before" and be as unimpressed
as if your style was lacking in every way imaginable.

Side by side we stand,
porous and damp with library mildew
picked up to be smelled, not read.
Each of us offer our spines to them
not admitting whose pages are whose..

Dispersion

One day, when the fog had nested
down in the brush and under the bellies
of the wet, spotted leaves,
we planted ourselves
in its absence. We waited then,
under the fat sun, for roots and leaves
and swarthy branches
to untangle and detach themselves from our skin,
for them to push from the crowns of our heads like antlers.
We grew – slowly, our skin
first breaking like porcelain and then more like paper,
turning to mulch around our wormlike roots,
which rose and leapt and burrowed under the ground again,
like fish leaping from water.

She spoke out of her tired, dilated spine
about how her lumberous body
seemed to ask for wildfire,
for ash. She heaved a great sigh,
scattering water onto the ground from her boughs.
She turned to me, creaking like
the underbelly of a ship, to say,
“It is heavier than I thought it would be.”
Her trunk sloped downwards into the sleeping fog,
threatening to collapse altogether.

She talked about light
and hunger, how her hands
could not seek anymore, only grew and splintered
and were thin, always twisting into the dark –
the luminescence she could see,
spreading upwards and far off, from our old house.
And then, she was silent, watching the light
as if she were a quiet predator, as if praying for it.

“I bet they’ve built a fire in the fireplace.
The smoke is so delicate.
I wonder how far it goes up there,
before it starts disappearing, too.”

studies in sound

i.
it’s a sharp staccato that dances softly
spinning words into colors that don’t quite aline
in ¾ time to spin away on upbeats, unfinished.

ii.
a melodic line only hears itself

iii.
brass wasn’t made for small fingers and delicate sounds
muted to a duller roar than drum beats
striking lightning

iv.
counter melody rests in the crevices
left between baseline and treble line
dancing just off beat to chase percussion
and whistling bells for second place
in a race predetermined by score.

v.
you cannot strike a
major chord in dissonance
but in assonance

Pocket!

http://i278.photobucket.com/albums/kk93 ... jqjbsi.jpg

@Pocket!