Young Writers Society

fear is curled up at the bottom of your cupboard--
lifeless, decaying, inching into your soul with its ghostlike embrace.
cremate it; here, in this land,
we do not bury strangers.

here's to a (hopefully) less crappy year than the previous two.

1/30

bones

-

in our village, the tribal leaders wear no masks;
their hearts are made of feathers,
and their eyes are black liquor.
when they speak to us--but they never speak to
us--it is to trim our bodies from the downside up,
and to dance on a graveyard of our hissing flesh.

we have been taught, from early on,
that all staircases are skeletons for unwritten stories--
but it is beyond our capacities to imagine ourselves
to be their words. and we have been taught,
in the sanctity of our households, holding loose cripples up
by their loose crippled flesh, that we are skeletons
for villages that will never escape the vacuity
of our liquor eyes.

'my phalanges are your spine; your joints
the sound of the thornshrubs when the world
whispers your name. we are deaf
to the wind, to the sun when it shackles our wrists
to the clouds, calling to us, asking
for our bones.'

'but i cannot hear them, i swear,
my head is building castles in the earth,
and my feet skim the sky. sometimes, i dream
of castles in cordoba, but my heart
tells me to first fill the ache within my bones.'

in our village, we are made of quiet acceptance,
and our leaders are not our leaders
once they have chewed our cartilage
and torn us down for generations to come.

our leaders
have bones,
and these bones will be taken from them.

this, i have learnt.
this, You have Taught me.

2/30

journey

-

you step through the archway
and leave your bags behind; it is noon,
but the station is empty.

you can hear people talking,
feel their hands brushing against yours--a burning kiss
against your collarbones.
‘see you next week, take care, love
you.’

they are there,
like wisps of smoke,
but you cannot see them.

solidity is the handbag beneath your arm, the safety
of the ground underneath your feet.

you are carried by mist, up to the platform--
and the train is full
of people. your carriage is gilded,
but its walls, beneath the gold,
are mock-glitter and paper in the lamplight.
the seats whisper,
‘take us on a journey.’

you stand by the window
and wave awhile.

the train moves on.

your fists gather spiderwebs, your cheek presses into the hot,
slippery material of a windowseat--the walls
shake, and there is chaos as people
search for lost trinkets you know they will never find.
but perhaps it is human nature to do this--
the suspension of disbelief,
in the hope you will extract a kiss from your collarbones
after it is gone.

the train climbs a mountain.
fireflies hover outside your window at the descent;
you knock elbows with passengers, tell them that they are stars--
they laugh with you, and do not notice
when the sky falls over your face.
fireflies are only visible at night.

in this train, the passengers sleep,
and their voices grow clearer, stronger--
the smoke they breathe, you swallow, and the memories
fade into the day, into new journeys
spurred on by hours of sleeping wonder--disappearing
in a horse's trot by daywalk over the cliff.

you enter a tunnel, and it grows dark.
the station nears.
‘thank you,’ the seats say,
‘for always being so kind.’

they leave you at the depot,
surrounded by stars.
there is silence, and you sigh.
a faint smell of gasoline
pricks at your nostrils--hesitantly, your hands reach up
to touch the trees:
the willows are pale rails against the sky’s earthen landscape.

‘come,’ you say to the clouds.
‘take me on a journey.’

Pomp! My partner for this thing! So, I must say I like the images you have and the stories your poems share. They have that cut deep within you emotion, like a loaf of bread being pulled out of the oven. It hits home, almost.

Continue up with the great work! I'll be looking out for your works in the near future. ^^

3/30

brother

-

a stranger tiptoes through these streets,
sieving his loved ones from unholy grace--
the sky’s mouth is gaping, spewing
graffiti from its chapped, bloody lips.

the sky wrecks worlds asunder, coats them in black paint,
summons devils to dance above ruins--
the sky mocks, mocks the stranger with his loose gait.
it calls the suffering, and watches them suffer.

the stranger finds his brother beneath this sky,
his eyes gaping, spewing thorny branches from their depths.

he finds his brother pinned to a wall, and he says, ‘brother, are you Syria now? your face is alive,
but your heart--it shudders, for yesterday
you were Paris, and last month, Bahrain,
and some days i fear you will be more.’

their fingers dance along their scabs,
their shackles rattle, and their tears drive
knives into their skin. pinpricks of light
in stormy silence, dashes of morse code
on their lips. they sigh, and around them,
the world trembles. they laugh,
and it trembles still.

‘brother, you have a gurney for a grave,
brother, how can you smile when you sleep
on your tombstone? brother, it is quiet,
yet i can hear your bones creak,
and shriek, because they cannot hold you up
much longer.’

the stranger flits when he hears other strangers passing,
hears them bring out their smoke packages
and tie them to their wrists; the stranger flits,
and the other strangers tremble, and mark
their brother for a siren.
drag him to his seaweed shroud,
kiss him with stones,
and leave him for the sky.

nobody hears the brother when he says,
‘hurt me as you will, but i will stand.
we are foot soldiers drawing crooked paths
in verdure, hanging our hearts out to dry in the sun;
we are restless tides reaching to kiss the moon,
but in this battlefield, you have a closed range of skyisthelimit.’

they hurt him as they will, and yet he stands.

4/30

shorn

-

they sheared the bud blossoming within you
sheer troubling miserable they said
.
they sheared the bud
hung it up - an umbrella on the sidewalk -
for people to see
.
storm clouds hiccough along your horizons -
worlds exhale but you cannot breathe
impaled by fog crystallised turned into glass -
thunder raises a fist to strike -
cirrus filters turn their heads away
.
a bud inside
shorn away
.
the clouds remain

I love "shorn" and I'm not sure why. It has a feeling of one of those old songs that you know have a sinister undertone but you can't quite place your finger on what it is because it's almost cheery- or that's what it reminded me of anyway. I really liked "hiccough" for some reason- I kept thinking of it as a hiccup but it was nice. And the way it's formatted just pulled me to each line without fail. C: <3

thank you, you two<3

5/30

-x-

in memoriam~

-

she watches her seasons skid past--
breathes spring into autumn,
and day into dusk. she forgets
to count her bones on her fingers
as they begin to fall, playing music against
her basement's ceiling.
[the piano man is huddled up in a casement in her brain;
she tells the doctor to revive him, but he does not know what to say.]

she lost herself in a war, she will tell you,
then ask how that war came to be. she will sing
and ask you for the tune--'do you remember?'
her heart is growing old; the fates
spin her mind into a corset
and drive the memories into her waist.

the curvature of her skull is a sky for breeding marshes--
mangroves press their knees into her neck,
kiss her spine with their crossbows

she watches her seasons fade into miscellany;
watches plates quake, her life transform--
we are geologically stranded, we are rivers in our own right,
but lately, her river has been dropping rocks onto her spine
and she cannot take the weight.
[she forgets she cannot take the weight.]

you watch her wither, like a leaf in autumnal relapse.
you watch her wither, shake, frailty sinking its teeth in her bones;
there is nothing you can do,
but remind her of what she is,
and how, and why, and how she changes.

her bones have twisted into question marks;
age silenced the interrobangs at the ends of her wrists--
her fingers spin to Tchaikovsky, collapsing
in the ensuing thrum of a ballet without an audience to waste.

foaming white verdure hitting the rocks--she flies every which way
and moans when she hits the sand. there are no shackles for silence
in a human cove, when your cells are perspiring and your nerves
forget how to brake.

her life is punctuated by an ellipse at the end of every heartbeat;
her hands are cold and her heart is pockmarked--
wearing away. she calls life a seduction,
she has fallen in a kind of love
she can't remember,
but the tide keeps on rolling her river back
to where we are.

6/30

this city, my city

-

the ocean spilled onto the pavement yesterday
and dragged the clouds down, to tickle their toes;
it invaded my house, black stirring ink filling up an inkwell,
and wrote an invitation on my window
to all the ghosts who were in town



in the morning, when i woke, the ocean lay thickly through my hair,
marking my spine with twining bands of copper, and carrying me,
the anchor to its sailship—
to a somewhat different home


when i run, the ocean chases me


they build prison cells and castles, use our skulls for their starboards;
Gwadar is an echo in the distance, please, carry me there~
this city holds no joy; here, we shall not prosper,
because in the dark, the sea sends monsters
to wrap thorny brambles around our necks, muzzle
our hopes; they tie me to a mazar, and ask me to pray,
and preach—


ghosts follow me home, shamans from another time.
their breaths are toxic and sticky; they cling
to my bones. i collide with yesterday’s aperture,
tear the mast into forgettory, drive the splinters
into the sea’s dark, heaving, gluttonous flesh.

ویری نائس

7/30

-

‘so,’ he asks, ‘what did you learn today?’

today, i learnt there is no more room in my collection
for mottled bruises to stand in;
the pillars in my house have become swollen,
and veiny, and ill from the floods that reproach them,
and the shelves creak under the weight
of a world they were not meant to carry in the first place.

‘but everyone has a weight to carry,’ he tells me,
and he tells me that the fact that i have not crumbled yet
is a sign that i am meant to be.

‘to be what?’ i ask, but the earth lifts itself up around my feet, the door
slams shut, i am a fly
in a bottle, bouncing off the walls,
i am a bluebottle in the process
of forgetting how to swim. the earth meets the sea’s carpet,
sunsets licking the shiny skin on my hand, hot
and proud, like furnaces that have flown too close to earth
and fallen in love with it.
but if we were to paint sunsets,
they would breathe in all our colours of grief.
‘and i would not wish imprisonment on anyone,’ i tell him.

‘but what would you do if this was permanent--an effortless cycle
of strife?’ he asks. ‘for me--effortless, for you,
never, never so.’

the walls have begun to rattle.
strange beasts hail noontide, howl beyond, lick the sand, lick the gravel, salivate sticky surrender on the remains of our bones.
the walls rattle. inside, silence kisses the beeches,
and it is cool and calm in the dank.

‘did you see the Sky this morning?’ my Teacher asks.

‘clearer,’ i say, ‘than i have for a long time.
it is hard to exist. but perhaps
we were always meant to seek Existence instead.’

8/30

[version 1.0 of a slam poem I wrote for a local event recently.]

-

we are poets.
we are warlocks to imagination,
the cry of the furies that echo over a chasm.
we are untitled misery, entitled to adventure.
we think we know everything, but in actuality, we know nothing--
and people think we are brave because we take nothing
and turn nothing into words.

we are poets.
we are, we are st--st--stuttering piles of paper-scrap in your hallway,
the black-inked tears running down your window
in torrential monsoon rain, the sound
of typewritten feet, padding softly on your carpet.
we don't ask for much; we are afraid to ask for too much.

we want nothing more than to be heard--yet,
yet we are afraid,
because telling stories is like letting the curtain fall over the audience,
swathing them in the darkness of our own decay;
it is taking the minotaur by its horns
and guiding it to paths lined with thornscrub and rose bushes.
we cannot help hurting ourselves; poets
are vulnerable.
we are pictured as people who take the broken
and create something new out of it, but that's not what we do--
we just take the broken
and break it some more.

once upon a time,
there was a five-year-old girl whose favourite room had circular walls --
she remembers it because it was a library.
it was where she learnt to see the universe unravel along paperbacks,
hear Mozart rap his hearing horn
against the typewritten text
of stories gone to dust, turned to rust, bleeding stardust on the brain
and laying the mundane to waste.

when she was ten years old, that library came burning down;
she was not there to see it but she swears that she hears
the ashes echo to this day.
when she was ten years old, she learnt
that she had the ability to set the mundane to waste.
and she wrote. and she wrote.
she wrote of buildings where cracked brown ribs on the walls were called 'bookshelves',
cradling all sorts of secrets, all sorts of stories, all sorts of people
who were afraid of telling those stories.
she learnt to spin words into cobwebs, sweep the dust
off imagination's silver visage and speckle
the pages with stardust. she was
a poet. i am a poet.
and i am afraid, like all poets are, because we have loud minds,
and louder imaginations, yet sometimes we are quieter
than the squealing of mice in the gutter.

we are libraries in our own right and the bookshelves are unmarked.
sometimes i'm afraid we will be devoured like my library was,
by the lisping dragon trails of a fire that scattered stardust cannot put out.

9/30


<i>

i left for Alaska this morning, donated your heart to the morgue, packed my bags with the quiet thrum of persistent heartache. the rain lub-dubs against the roof and i roll the windows down, breathing in the remnants of a past the sky has left here for me. ‘search for meaning in the little things,’ you'd told me once, but you had always been one of those artists who stuck their heads into the marianas trench and still expected to breathe.

‘i am drowning,’ your voice messages say. ‘come back. bring me a life raft, send me a postcard.’ you told me once that loving frightened you, and that when you loved, it was skating down the slope too fast and plunging too deep, and you had never really been one of those people who bothered learning how to swim.

‘click your heels and find your way to me,’ i’d told you--once, long ago, on a night that feels deadbeat and cloudy in memory, like the stale smell of recycled cigarette smoke. it reminds me of half-bitten stars and snakeskin dangling loosely over the horizon, clouds like thumbnails demanding to be pressed. it speaks to me of pulse-races around an endless circuit where venom seeps through the gravel on the turnpike--it feels

like your heart against my hand, as it stilled and started, and paddled against the murky waters of a great unknown.

‘find your way to me,’ you say. ‘you've always been better at it anyway. and the north star has fallen off my chin and punctured my chest. send me a map, send me a missive, send me a message--a postcard from Alaska.’

<ii>

i left a letter on your homestead before i left, quiet words rattling in a jar of unread thoughts. ‘open me’, the jar said. ‘don't leave me out here in the sun, because the sun has a reputation for hating the miserly, and my contents are cancerous left alone.

‘don't leave me in the sun,’ the jar said. ‘follow me, follow me to Alaska.’

10/30

my bones are marzipan.
little by little--you gnaw
at them--little by little
your rivers flow upstream--
in a crevice filled with freshwater,
the fish have grown carnivorous,
and they tear at my eyelids--rock
&sediment &underlinings of erosion--
tear the taste of sweet
and salt in my palms--
away~