Young Writers Society

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i. giraffe breath

the growing boy is given two stuffed toys:
this is important because two is his age
and toys are what he should need, not G-Tubes nor
CPAP machines; yet when he plays with the giraffe,
because the elephant was just so basic,
a giraffe's mouth straps to his mouth--
and at age two he has his first kiss,
crying as he's forced to breathe alien breath.

Ahhhhhhhh, yes! So, I get so excited about poems :3 This one for sure. This is just cute and endearing and also kind of ...aches! That subtext at the end just aches my heart :c

So this was a little weirder than your usual stuff, but I've never read something so lovely that included giraffes and aliens as part of it. As Audy said, it aches and it hurts and you do that right.

my heart

ii. twilight acrylic

let's call my time wasted on this thought a cool decade:
how it'd be to have my brain displayed on a wall--but
too dark, too intrusive and horrid and someone picks up a phone
already to dial--but no.

it's different in decade two, how
your friend of >decade <decade two asks you
to an art gallery where everything is inspiration, where
everything is a rippling memento. and i transfix on
these brains displayed on walls, these synthetic brain cells
in twilight acrylic that crush me.



and asked what does it say to you?
i say we change and cleanse, no matter the burn.

iii. base jump

there is no metaphor here when i say
when he told me to jump off a bridge, i did.

and the gut-plunge of the bungee cord
echoes when i think of him even now.
right now, writing a letter to you
about men and bridges,

and how i've grown to trust neither.

but the rush of falling is just that:
so quick and extreme that it enters our dreams.
and i wonder if this is because we are born headfirst
out of equilibrium, or if we've watched too many stars,
or if we've shot down to earth from a soul collective
in a universe adjacent, or a warning that we will fall again
and again - and again--

never to hit a bottom but to understand that we chose
to dive from the bridge because this beautiful man with auburn eyes
told us to, and these dreams are an eternal base jump, time to ruminate
on his Versace cologne, or how we let him love us unconditionally
until this, the adrenaline of true love.

but--

he never cut the cord, you know.
i just didn't ask
if it was tied down.

or if we've shot down to earth from a soul collective
in a universe adjacent, or a warning that we will fall again
and again - and again--

Thanks for this Lumifriend, some of my favorite lines I've read in a long time.

iv. pipe dream

it was easy accepting that you cared more
for sleek black metal than you did for me.
a letter written to self, titled black mustang
wherein you promise to drive me across the nation
with the wind and potential breaking against the hair
on our jaws. in a pipe dream full of pipe dreams
i can say that yours was the calmest, the closest to heart;
and that when that sleek metal faded into the horizon--
no one at your side because that's who you needed,
and always had--
that pipe dream among pipe dreams burned the sweet sap
in my bones like none had before.

hell, i think you created an addiction.

Missed your third poem on accident, and wow. You got me. I love that one. Your fourth one plays with a different style, and I like that. It feels more experimental.

v. sinking luminaries

you and i
two sinking luminaries
in the center of an asphalt ocean highway
thinking maybe the country will liquidate
and take us in together maybe

we can be part of the eternal georgia roadways
as broken and tarnished we are
qualified.

but eternity is such a long exhale
by lungs that just have long-before given up
on providing for the body of the cosmos
and i look to you, not on fire, not lost in the night, and say

if you don't walk away
there'll be nothing of you to love

vi. brief spot

scientifically speaking, world-at-large, with our microcosm
of an experimental life contained within either a state of mind,
a state of shock, or a state of heat, sweat, and backwater whistling,
i was right when i said lightning struck when we kissed.

looking back, though, in the summer heat and the gate-hopping
to belong to country-club pools, there was something about our story
that reads we never belonged (together).

memories in floods and spastic raindrops, droughts and downpours:
i see your face and realize the whole affair, just a brief spot, was
a freckle on your neck, a sunspot on your shoulder to be kissed.
it was the iris in your eye that quivered when asked about happiness.

vii. pavlov

i have promised, jeez let's say,
1,000 times on 1,000 days
to meet you industrial-side,
moonlit, summer-night chilled,
cigarette in teeth.

pavlov, i should name this letter--
because he was a man who knew the future.
if you ask me each day
to be with you each night, (and)
if the anxiety each day
becomes depression in the night, (then)
there will be fear,
there will be absence,
there will be
silence.

night 1,001 and i wither beyond the gate;
and so gorgeous on the factory wall,
moon-kissed under passing cirrus
art from years of a patient heart.

vii-b. angel in the shallows

1. you cannot forget
ocean blue and how misty fragrance
embroidered in the contours of my mind
out in the shallows of caye caulker
floats a sun-tanned angel unbelievable
may i pray to you each night

2. you cannot repair
limitless blue above savannah
the jets roar overhead and i think
of the sands you've held me on
the footprints we've left together
_______________________parabolic
and the deafening silence
of each and every kiss

3. you cannot move on
stormy gray of the potomac
and i see the time on a watch old and graying
imagine you guarding the citizens innumerable
silent as a stone, still as my
hands and knees in the sands
as seafoam wings took you away

Your most recent poem is so beautiful <3