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Young Writers Society


How to Deal with the Buzzards Poking at Your Eyes



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Fri Apr 28, 2017 2:19 am
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TheSilverFox says...



Despite hope, I persist.

Poem the twenty-eighth: Written on April 27th, 8:05 PM -- The Lady

Spoiler! :
Today was the last day for our doctor,
as she stood up and walked down the aisle
with her gut on her shoulder and entrails
sagging under their own bulky weight as she came
by the counter, placed her head in her hands
and began to weep to a befuddled secretary
who was nevertheless happy to hear a sob story
after spending eight hours pouring through spreadsheets,
ignoring angry calls from a vehement husband,
and looking through the works of Isaac Asimov
to see if Our Lady of Grace could make androids
dream of electric sheep eagerly following their masters
(silent or otherwise).

And the doctor sat down on a chair and stared
at the crack in the ground that had once held a mouse
that, however cornered, was still poisoned
by the whims of an uncaring exterminator
who did his job out of banal sadism and cruelty:
"I am at my wit's end, Elizabeth, as my cousin
with the heart of clay has finally arrived,
but he is weak, his fingernails torn and broken,
his hair falling off in clumps (I think he used glue
to hold them in place), and his body pale and starved,
though he still floats above his hospital bed.
They said he is mad now, dreaming of tsunamis
and the body of a young girl suspended in a tree
that he calls My Sorrows, that she has aged him
like one would bake and crack a painting
or stuff wine at the bottom of a rusty, moldy ship
for decades."

Elizabeth placed a hand on the doctor's shoulder
(cracked from nervously washing her hands
after every half-hour that she spent with her once-beloved)
and whispered a reply in her faint melodic voice,
"Our creations are not always the most stable,
what with my daughter halfway across the world
being tended to by the best doctors in America
as I made a deal the man with the cup of tea
to keep her away from her father, after the man said
that she wouldn't be living for much longer,
just as the young man handed his artist's drawings
to my eldest son before letting a black cancer take him."

"What matters," they echoed in solemn unison,
before the nervous mothers and fathers and children
and doctors preparing antidepressants and calling
a psychiatrist to fix the lady who had tried to fix everything,
"Is that they might alive at all, that our Frankensteins
can persist for even a second longer than our nightmares
would seduce us or have us begin to believe,
as then we have held them aloft on our shoulders
to admire the wide Earth sloping above them,
and raise to grip the heavens, as we all will."
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

Inferno, Canto 27, l 61-66.
  





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Points: 24185
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Sat Apr 29, 2017 2:18 am
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TheSilverFox says...



The direct successor to poem the ninth. And tying up the narrative arc over this and next two poems, in case you couldn't tell. :P

Poem the twenty-ninth: Written on April 28th, 7:55 PM -- From Anatolia


Spoiler! :
My lighthouse lies on the opposite shore
casting a wide yellow beam over ruined ships
led by cocky sailors who wouldn't be pulled
onto a land that had no caring for their stories,
the disfigurement of their legs, or golden teeth,
and had rather chosen to throw themselves away
by fighting against a growing, madding wave
that mopped the decks, smashed all the windows,
and stabbed into old man playing dead man's hands
as the groaning vessel, covered in weeds
in maggots collecting upon the prideful girl
at the hull, she casting a torch over sharp rocks
eating into and consuming a water-washed craft
so that even the bottled versions might weep
and fear for their own moment of release,
demise.

I am in the hospital now, and they drug me
with pills that numb the mind, cast aside
a crust of ancient fears and anxieties
through the wave of an enigmatic hand
that doesn't care how much of the scalp,
the skull, or the cerebrum is pulled up too
(as though it is a weed that must be removed
however painfully, however much of a vegetable
I become as I lay beside the clay-hearted man
and am treated by doctors who pat me fondly,
gazing upon me warmly and patronizingly,
considering me an infant no matter how much
the smallest working part of my brain screams out
"I am still alive, I am stuck, I cannot breathe,
I am trapped in hell by your goddamn syringes")
so I might forget the day I decried my friend
as the Ukrainian bastard living on a perfectionist's dream
and how the Russian winter was inevitable
because the sweeping arms of fate and time
and the infinite power of human weaponry
alike pull down the legs of innocent men
into a quicksand that now only seeks blood,
no matter the signs they hold in protest.

His brothers treat me now, but they cannot heal
a man who has given his life and treasures
(once kept in the now-opened, rusting safe
in a collapsing and frail basement held up by chemicals
seeing through every corner and against its every will)
for a falsehood, he whom I would walk to Anatolia
and teach the Greeks of his specific whims;
now I am Paul for no man, but the compatriot
of the patient hovering just an inch above his bed,
both of us struck by the realization that we are not generals
nor diplomats, and the sun also rises
whether we are alive to be blinded by it or not,
so we had best spread our will and final hopes for peace
as the oncoming masses now descend on this hospital
for the final confrontation over our dying bodies
(and I am happy, as it is more attention than I received in life).
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

Inferno, Canto 27, l 61-66.
  





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Points: 24185
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Sat Apr 29, 2017 11:55 pm
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TheSilverFox says...



He's descending, and he doesn't have much time left until he settles down for the first and last time in his life.

Poem the thirtieth: Written on April 29th, 5:35 PM -- Evening Beacon

Spoiler! :
The bike rack is full today,
and every young man has tied theirs
to the posts of their remembrances
so that they might be forever attached to something
and not float eagerly away, to be replaced
by the memory of the day they were left abandoned
on the roadside, embedded into growing trees
whose leaves produce spokes stabbing at couples
carving their names beneath, as my son suffered from
during his only date two years ago.

The adobe gospel spreads among us,
and we compelled to travel across the nation
in the name of a man we have never known,
but whose nightmares have strewn our newspapers,
but whose bloody face has graced our news stations,
and whose plight now captures obituary-writers
patiently sitting at their posts, dabbing their eyes
as they await the day when the dead man walking
hands them their notes, gives them their poetry
to wax lyrical on the eons of ignorant life
leading their blind selves further into the rat's maze
around them, for better or for worse,
and beseech that they weep for their families,
lost friends, and everyone beyond himself
(as he is no man, but all men and women and children,
and is the conduit for all).

My son flies from his finite skies on paper wings
to join me as the man with the cup of tea in his hands
stands solemnly besides Elizabeth, who embraces me
and tells me that she will never forgive me for the lash,
the cackling and the fury that I should be cursed
by a family two steps above me, taunting by grace
and delightful steps in beautiful palisades that lock me
outside, among the rain and cardboard boxes and dogs
whose teeth ache in agony, bodies broken and sore;
but, for this one day, she will acknowledge
how I did try my best to hold them over my head
when they could not step for themselves,
even if it was solely because I could not muster
anything other than anger by which to function,
and needed the return of it if I wanted to keep myself
alive.

And she leads me to the man with the adobe body,
suspended silently a half-inch above the bed,
with his hands clasped on a thank-you card on his chest
from his Peter, who now weeps beside him as he stands
beside the man with the eyepatch and a beer bottle
(demanding that the judgmental preacher bartender
stop pouring holy water into his whiskey
and watch him use a candle to light the darkened room)
with the apostle and his younger self sitting down
beside each other, gradually morphing between each other
as they take turns breathing deeper and deeper.
"My final miracle," whispers the clay-hearted man
over and over again as I collapse on my knees, grab my head,
and am struck by decades of regret wracking my body,
embracing by a crying ex-wife acknowledging
that this will be the final moment in our lives
during which, defying our spirits and the whims of a mean fate
(as he had done, parting them aside like Moses),
we are united, as he had hoped, in a peace
too short and pure to be tainted by all existence.
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

Inferno, Canto 27, l 61-66.
  





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299 Reviews



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Points: 24185
Reviews: 299
Sun Apr 30, 2017 11:57 pm
TheSilverFox says...



Final poem for NaPo, the conclusion of the narrative arc, and a few last words to commemorate a vibrant and lovely month.

Poem the thirty-first: Written on April 30th, 5:35 PM -- È finito

Spoiler! :
i know not if i am awake anymore,
nor do i think i care; all of these years
have cracked my eggshells
and splintered by nutcracker frame,
but i have chewed and spat out
thousands of bloody sharks teeth echoing
sentiments on how the silver lining
might turn to lead and sink, dragging traces
of prisms crafting waterfalls from rainbows
so that these heavy balloons might die
in an overwhelming roar, unnoticed
as they descend into a hungry lake
until one takes time to walk over the surface
and grab the pieces of string sticking out
from the ice.

it was not a life; it was a collage
of every color that i could think of
(and thousands more that i could not)
in which my soul expanded beyond the horizons
to bring me dreams of how we all fly
into the heavens, whether with stone wings,
or pulled up by the graces of a loving nature,
or cast the demons of their madness
down into fiery circles, where they might dance
in entrancing ways to none but themselves,
as they have now been ignored and allowed
to flourish unabated by terminated minds,
or the constraint of any kind of human flesh.

these paintings and curves have made a gallery
that has kept me company as i lost my sight
with that of her bloody body on the tree;
and how i lost my hearing to the sound
of battered seagulls and young children
stuck among whirlwinds of bricks and stones
to break bones and trample impressionable minds,
caught in a lifetime they won't know
until it's too late for them to forget it;
and how i lost my sense of taste
when i had taken myself into cooking
only to craft nothing but meals of gold
that reminded me of my mother's sausages,
my father's strong tobacco, and sea salt;
and how i lost my sense of smell
by the pungent odors of extricated bodies,
saline solutions, layers of disinfectant,
and how they washed books clean
with the blood of lambs;
and how i lost my sense of touch
when not even the air around me
could give me anything beyond staleness
from years of inhalers and a mouth
that had already breathed in far too much
without leaving any tips to the waiter.

if i said i was trapped, it would be the truth
and it would be a lie, as now, dying,
descending onto the ground from which
i had been made by the cousin-builder,
i can now practice my final miracle here
by releasing my clouds and dreamscapes
so that they might avoid the grisly fate
of all my past balloons, capture others' hearts
and inflame in them love, anger, hope, jealousy,
sadness, tension, anxiety, the essences of life.
i have no need for any of them anymore,
and i want them to escape these ruined walls,
leaky roof, collapsing rooms, the weary old man
without limbs, with a pacemaker, hearing aids,
all that which keeps them locked forever
in the frayed diary and with the busted skeleton key
marking my ancient and decaying mind.

and then, accompanied or otherwise, i can rest;
i can die, the mortal shell that had decayed
years ago recognizing the separation of church and state,
and leave itself as a dying deer before beautiful palisades,
granting boons to those nervous passengers driving about it
on how to deal with the buzzards poking at your, our, their eyes.

and so the comedy is finished.
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

Inferno, Canto 27, l 61-66.
  








i don't need to search the stars to know myself
— soundofmind