Young Writers Society

11/30

dig caves within the bark of some old, forgotten tree.
write yourself a story. sing yourself a song.
go on rampages, see the world, find a palace you belong in--
fill the canyons in your heart with somebody else's pain,
and run, run until the wind bites at your ankles and misses,
until sharks lag behind you, for want of adrenaline,
until you have mudded the cracks in your walls
and built a last flight of rickety steps to climb.
dig caves within the bark of some old, forgotten tree--
knit lilies
in your spine;
go out and be.

12/30

'imagine a place where home is never where you think it is,
where you always stop at the wrong intersection, take the wrong train,
press "re-do", and never falter. imagine a world
where hesitance is indifferent, where people do what they want
and hurt no one.'

'but--imagine a world we already have,
where we draw kindness in the sand
and watch the sea carry it away.
imagine a world where heartache is bitter,
and the smell of smoke and burnt houses is strong
on your lips. imagine a world
where the tunnels are dark,
and candles flicker in the night.
imagine a world where we are composed of boxes,
boxes you can reach into and never touch the bottom--imagine
us as vessels, imagine us as halting, thinking, tasting the sky--
imagine us, then, imagine us, then,
as automatons.

what would there be worth striving for in the end?'

13/30

brokenness is an umbrella term
for all of those people you left out
in the rain. fragility is not a heart
made of glass, but a heart
in the wrong element. where the wind
is callous, and iron brands paper,
and chiffon is used to make tents with.

14/30


i will not i will not i will not i will not
never not never not never not--

i make promises to myself before the sun rises,
forget them in the dawn, lose them in the lining
of the clouds--'hem them with forged misery,' i say.

but in the haze of early morning,
everything is an unreality, and like all unrealities,
my heart demands i feel them.

watch your promises unravel around your feet, my heart says,
watch them turn to smoke and create willows against the dusky sky.

i will not i will not never not will not never not--

break yourself, my heart says.
my heart is a liar in early morning stillness:
it is unwise, it tells me what worth is,
but definitions tend to be subjective, i have learnt;
and if my heart thinks me a fool for hovering over the clouds,
i will let it be.

our aim is not to be accepted, the wiser part of me tells me,
but to accept ourselves for being.

15/30

it took me a long time to learn
that in this world, people use halos
to strangle you, and half-truths
to cage you, and when you are all out
of ticker-tape, they sap all the radiation from your skin.

it took me a long time to learn
that a half-life is not as large a number
as i believed it to be. the blues can destroy you;
the sound of steady breathing: salvation,
unless the clouds are stealing your air.

it took me a long time to realise
that the words i knit are stilted
and the worlds i sew are broken
and in a workshop filled with wooden philanthropy,
i grind into the desks with black ink.

you shall not/may be/will be remembered.

pick a tune/letuspickforyou.

it takes a long time to learn.

16/30

For @Hiraeth

somewhere in this world, the moon has slipped and fallen,
crashed into somebody's garden shed, disturbed somebody's restless slumber.
somewhere in this world, a nightingale has fallen asleep.

when the tides wrap themselves around the earth, Atlas groans,
and the ground whimpers, and your heels skid against the sand.
when the moon falls, you reach out to touch it--
some nights, it tastes strange against your lips;

somewhere in this world, a person is quaking,
somewhere in this world, the plates are shifting--
you stand on the epicentre of a kind of wonderment
that the Richter scale cannot measure;
your feet skid on the sand.

do you think the moon quakes at night?
it may be because you always reel it down too quick,
and hoist it up too slowly--
and when you toss stardust into the sky,
it is sure to travel far.

17/30

i found you sitting on needlepoint;
surrounded by asters, coughing up lilies
in the quiet vicinity of betrayal.

'here we are again,' you said,
'at the beginning of turmoil and disarray.
here we are, and here we are swallowed,
by the shadowy cloak of dusk
before it turns to dark.'

galaxies, opaque and crystal, hovered
over the thin, crisp, papery membrane above your eyes.
you quoted them, oft, as being heavy
and devoid of rhythm,
a lily bouncing in your coat pocket,
a comet-strip tapering off the edge of your tongue.

i found you, sitting there, darning the holes
in your wallet, and warming the calluses that burned,
with icy fringe, over your heart.

'this is where we hem the flowers together.
this is where the stars burn holes in your tongue--
this is where you taste the vapours of a galaxy;
the end is close, we are on needlepoint
and we know it.

but there is time yet,
so come, let us taste the universe while it lasts.'

18/30


a sparrow sits on my windowledge--says,
‘i am Philomela, so love me, love me, world,
and watch my tongue craft melodies
you will forever delight in.’

my fingers to its feathery breast are betrayal,
and in morning lassitude, the window itself impeaches
the boundaries between mind and soul,
because in the quiet of the sparrow’s song,
I can feel myself touching the sky.

the sparrow to my shuddering heart echoes betrayal--
‘i am Philomela,
so love me
if you will.’

19/30

there is a general air of impairment in these halls,
filtered air with sulphuric claws, walls like flatbread--
shaking, synchronous to the beguiling of a wind
that writes a novel to the world, and chastises its fellow authors.

the world, beneath my feet, feels strange tonight,
like it has been cut out of the back of a cereal box:
the sky, cardboard caving in against the universe's sporadic sunbursts.

the elements tear at the edges of this hall,
wind and frost driving their nails into the crooks
and crannies of the wall’s fanciful letterage,
as though hoping to disembowel the memories that lurk
underneath the wallpaper.

in these halls, a general air of impairment,
a monster roars, rubs its suede boots against chloral,
sandpapers its tongue. do you ever feel like,
it seems to say,
that the universe is in a box
and the walls are papered to hide the bars
and the keyhole, and the keys are only given to each person once?
they leave, without ever coming back.

we write epics, clickety clack, dropping bone china cutlery
and painting heartache on the ceiling: paint swirls,
and drips, heavy, like soupy rain.
swirl the world around in your mouth like the thick soup that it is;
now rinse it out with the feeling of acceptance, and sandpaper the grime
that accrues between your toes.

lately, i have begun to feel that--

20/30

Dedicated to @GoldFlame

--

there is a kingdom tucked away that the world’s blindsight cannot see:
you reach out to touch it, but backtrack,
hesitantly. now, people ask why this is,
and why it takes so long; but the world
is forever autumn, and autumnal is its song.

in autumn, all our rivers turn to crusted, thorny tongue;
the horned toad rides the water,
and the leaves cannot expunge--the mournful, murky sounds
of a land going to waste:
in eternal autumn, hesitation
immortalises its lanky pace.

and when the season grows old, and when you fail to see:
your hands still climb the mountains, though somewhat less
gracefully. and when you ride the river,
you are never alone;
although the rapids obscure
each pebbled hand, these pebbles are your throne:

to the lost kingdom the world fails to see.

21/30

--


you tip deserts from your winter bowl of silence,
translate a message--scorching suns trailing
from the tip of your index finger, and down,
until they shackle your spine.

fluid movements in torrid weather: tell me a story,
haunt my nightmares until my dreams see fit to burst and enter
the kind of ecstatic movement that only imagination brings.

kiss the sun--kiss it twice, kiss it until it sears,
kiss it until the world closes its eyes against the magnitude
of a love that burns bright and blazing and beautiful in the night sky.
your words are empty, spun-rackets, spun-twisting-ivy that catches on fire.
you carve ellipses into the earth's ribs, and wrap catherine wheels around its lungs.

tell me a story. our language is silence, we are the makers
of the sirens' waxing and waning brittle, tuneless songs.
tell me a story, in one language, two, ten, or none. tell me
about desert sands gathering on hearts that refuse to climb the dunes,
grime lathering hands that never work to be heard, stillness
encapsulating the sun and the moon and the earth within its wake--tell me
a story. tell me about what breaks you, tell me until it hurts. tell me.

i would not want to wake up to you, grime lathered, sinking
into dust.

22/30

--

lonely, a hand creeping up, skeletal stick figure piercing
into the sky; its leaves are like fireflies, but its backbone
shivers in the wind.

lately, the weather has not been kind to you;
in balochistan, they call this a western depression,
but it has ceased to bring with it rainfall
to feed our veins. and it has ceased
to love us, because we ceased loving
a long time ago.

skeletal stick figure, piercing loneliness, a hand creeping up;
the sky moves into your backbone, your leaves like fireflies.
your mouth hangs over the dusk. darkness hovers
above you, its hands pressing into your sides--its feathers
drive up and down your thighs, and you cry--
but want, for lack of rain. backbone shivering in the wind.
the weather ceased loving you a long time ago;

it's not your fault.

23/30

/when you just can't seem to shake the weight of living/

--

i ran out onto the street last night, needed a reminder
that you cannot take an aspirin for the pain that comes with healing--
i ran out onto the street, lit a matchstick, held it close to my palm.

'can you feel the heat? imagine the sun
sizzling down onto your chest--imagine that, suck a breath in--
breathe.'

the world curls up, languidly, smoke billowing from its eyes;
the world comes up to me, nonchalant, tactless, and tells me
that Atlas has a job opening for employment-seekers.

'but what about the dreamers?' i ask, and the world
casually disappears. 'what about the demons i keep nailed
underneath the floorboards? what about all the dust that sinks its teeth
along, lines its thin, prickly fingers along my trachea? what about the men
we mistake for angels? what about
wanting to run far away, where the world cannot hurt you?'

i ran onto the street last night, needed a reminder--
our cities clustered with fog, hearts blind, speeding on the motorway:
we are not angels and demons; we are demons
and dreamers.

24/30

--

take me back to bridge games
and despairing disguises in melodrama;
take me back to Lily Bart's concrete garden,
and paved walkways in Manhattan.

take me back, take me to mansions,
and slums, to breaching tides and broken vows:
take me to diamond rings and feather dusters,
to lessons in carpenting loose soil
and making carousels out of sailships.

take me to autumn, and to spring,
and to stray birds and curling telephone wires.
lest i forget, hold me still, let me feel
the spray of earthen memory on my lips, taste
gravel, love like the sea when it meets the horizon--
sanddusk across the water.

take me to seagulls, take me to finches crossing the wake:
to parks and landsliding staircases, crooked teeth on the roofs,
and turpentine filling piano-key spaces.

take me away, far away, 'from the corrosion
and attrition of soul.'

25/30

this is for somebody i know.

--

wasteland's daughter, the girl from across the street,
big-eyed, clumsily weaving through life, making winters
out of summer, and summers out of spring.
wasteland's daughter, her elbows knocking with graffiti-gizzards
and open-roofed houses: her spinal disks nervously
clatter in her cage.

she wears dismay like a copper band,
and irony as a headdress, and love like a childhood friend;
when she disappears, she slips between life's planes quietly,
so that one day she lugs last night's stale bread across the street,
and the next, she has left to attend her father's funeral.

he taught her that the world is bleeding;
he taught her that goodness is being good,
even when other people make it hard for you.
wasteland's daughter knows that to be loved,
you must love, and she knows that although
she clumsily trips through life,
she is doing it the right way.

when she comes back, she will teach me,
and i will teach her--about the world.