Young Writers Society

We found him again in the summer, among honeysuckle,
filled-in wells, rusting cars, popped tires, and campfire ashes,
and his head was littered with cracks, a no man's land
of dried ground covered with cattle skulls, fractured further
by miniature earthquakes that had grown in intensity
thanks to the water that dripped through him in monsoon nights
beneath a rainforest only capable of satiating one feral child,
and all he could shout out at us were that the yellow bombers
were coming again, that they were strafing his B-47,
and their mistake of taking prisoners the last few times
would be rectified.

Maybe they have him in a straitjacket now, wheeling him
through hallways lined with scrawled graffiti
of crude anatomical drawings, poorly-worded swears,
and whispers of wet brown leaves falling from trees in the autumn;
he might still be ranting onward about how he is Trotsky,
that it is his destiny to be struck in the head with an icepick
while his conspirator prunes the garden one last time
and takes a leftover rose to deliver to his wife in Fiji,
where they will sit upon beach sands with pina coladas
as he stands, shouts his last few words of warning
against the angels circling to capture his spirit,
and collapses onto the desk with the sound of a bell.

Like he had told me, that final day of his independence
in the realm of man, as the ambulance pulled up on our driveway
and narrowly avoided mailbox, dog, and stupid uncle alike -
I was his favorite brother, and so I could best keep a secret,
one in which he wanted the pain to stop, wanted these fights
among a thousand temptresses in his mind to end, let him sleep
on downy pillows as his emotions gasp their last
and be pulled into the bowls of the Ninth Circle,
where they might be frozen up to their own fragile, oblong heads
and suffer eternally before the chewing, weeping, dumb body of Satan
for their betrayal of his once spotless mind, having stabbed it
with the fervor of Cassius plus a man scorned by his fall from grace,
leaving it black and wormy with rot;
"I wish I never had to let myself be consumed by every moment
so I am forced to wail for my endless last years."

When she was six years old,
she would run on her stubby legs
and yell to people how she wanted to build
a bridge stretching over the Atlantic,
so she could visit my pen pal in England,
sip tea and peruse the white cliffs
without having to travel by a sickening boat
where she might run into the walls
and slip while playing shuffleboard so the stick
would fall into the clear waters to bob cheerfully
by the shores of Jamaica.

I had the chance to go back ten years
to tell her that no, her pipe dream would die
the day that she felt a powerful headache
echoing doom inside her head as I took her
to the hospital on that Good Friday,
that good and pure Friday that spat poison
on my face and sunk me beneath the earth
like the people I saw on the news in Alaska
before the doctor told me stiffly that my daughter
was going to die, that she was going to fucking die,
she was going to sit in her hospital bed and weaken
as they ripped out every part of her that they could,
until they stripped her of her hair, grabbed a machine
to force her to breathe when she no longer could,
and throw my money into a bonfire on an oil tanker
rusted through with brine and sinking like a lead weight
trapped in the world's largest coolant tanks,
absorbing all the radiation that it could,
as I hope that my tears might make an incantation
that could give a few years, months, days, hours,
of me sitting, holding her hand, and staring into closed eyes
I hoped that, for a second, would flash green, if they could.

As fucking pointless as it would be in the end.

And the man who offered me that deal flicked his tail,
sipped from his cup of tea, and watched the blood
drain from my face, donning no expression on his own.

I said no.

if only the sky above my head was flat,
made of posterboard or metal or something more stable
than an infinite void of blueness stretching past my eyes,
with the stars cardboard cutouts suspended
over blue cloud-print wallpaper like my mother had,
splattered all over the bathroom with an hour
and 10 minutes of experience from Home Depot,
pulling my hand away whenever I made to touch the glue
and barred me from any path that led me to the walls
as though i would stick fast while she was gone,
and be trapped in a fourth dimension between the corners
that would suffocate me without her presence,
even when the man attached to the tea cup
asked me why.

maybe, if i could jump high enough of the tree
with multicolored wings made from paper i cut out
out of newspapers and colored sheets by the printer,
(which mom was using today to make a collage
of diseases and cures and strange names i didn't know)
i could touch incandescent lights flashing at me
while i soar over there, tugging at the string suspending them
to the ceiling so that i might keep my balance
and fly to wherever my father's far way land is,
where he said he had taken my sister to be guarded
by angels with lances, who had separated the two
and left him to plea and beg to solve a problem
that nobody would tell me about, besides what i heard
from their conversations in hushed tones, before mom
sat down, held our small dog in her hands, and cried.

i hope that an airplane might soar above me
clipping the edge of the sky as passengers look down
and see how i wrote on the newspaper,
"have you seen my sister?
will she be okay?"

Had our pioneers reappeared on the horizon
and tromped their way across the endless plains
that had defined their arduous journeys in the past,
those few of us still living among acres of corn
would've complained about hooves trampling our crop
and foul-smelling men dragging broken wagons to our restaurants
to sample the wares hungrily and pay in outdated, useless cash;
fortunately, with every old house or shed or farm
that is bulldozed by two hundred thousand dollar equipment,
we shed the husks of our past and leave them scattered
across the remains of corn-covered farmers and animals
boring visitors traveling through the state of Kansas
as we hide ourselves further within amber embraces.

I decided I'd rather not join generations of bodies
in an iron-fenced cemetery by small town America,
so I left fifteen years ago, when the world was still alive
and the politics were uncomplicated (all I was supposed to know
was that the best color for the world was red, even if blue
nibbled at the far-off California and New York, thriving
in the weakness of city slickers) and I was still young,
inspired by our neighbors sending us a stream of postcards,
flooding images of Portugal and Mali and Russia
through our door and atop the cat, who, like my mother,
cowered in the corner as they arrived.
I had never used my brain as much as I did when I stared
and imagined myself on the White Cliffs of Dover,
standing with my arms open wide like the Redeemer
as I shouted my name in a dull echo across the landscape,
my heart composed of electrical strings and lightbulbs
that resisted the oil fire when those fortunate individuals
stepped into Kuwait for the first and the last time,
the creek running dry.

It was then that I thought of myself as an explorer
searching for a lake in the midst of an ancient forest
guarded by rocky hills, gentle slopes, and overbearing air
manifesting itself in specters that would hold me
by the arms and ankles so that I might eat my own dust
and, bleeding, spit it out in a chewed pulp, reddening the trail
with gums and pieces of teeth worn through with determination,
which I hoped would take me to the top of the green mountain,
as though the sheer contradiction might lead a lady
to pop out from the water and hand me a brilliant sword,
or an angel would descend from the sky to hand me tablets
to spread yet another message in a typhoon-laden sea,
the former as likely to be ripped to shreds and consumed
as it was to pierce the soul of any man, woman, or child;
I was willing to take the risk for the glory.

Except now I still struggle as I crawl up the side,
hoping that I will not freeze to death in the winter winds
(now I no longer look for the mystical lake, as it stretches
above my head, looming upside-down and infinitely far away
as it leers and taunts me while I weep in fright and search
for a good cave)
and leave my body forever preserved, like Everest victims,
to be pointed to by strapping young men in hiking boots
strolling up the hill as they internally list mistakes and errors
written across the wrinkled, frozen face and bloody hands,
as though to a crowd of enigmatic tourists with smartphones:
he waited too long, he left too early, and there was nobody
left to wave him goodbye.

He had neither brevity nor gravity,
and I suppose that's what I loved about him;
the ocean of words that poured out
from the folds of rapidly shifting vocal chords
that could shout proudly against the thunder
and boom ecstasy against the distant heavens,
could almost pick him up from where he stood
on top of a deer in the midst of the grove -
they lifting him upwards and grabbing the trees nearby,
tearing their roots from the jealous ground
(with the full approval of the faithful Nature,
her stag now climbing into the air with him)
so that he be encased in a wooden throne
as he ascends before gasping onlookers
who have just seen a blasphemous miracle.

If he had gone that way,
maybe it would have been simpler for us all.

If there is blood on this page
when you come Tuesday to take
the bags of empty coke cans
and needles poking through the edges
to be dumped into a voracious furnace
that hisses in anticipation as it receives
its latest rush, I must apologize:
the soldiers were stationed on the corner
of the crosswalk, by the burned-out husk
that, 10 years ago, may have been a Panzer tank,
and they were happy to respond when they saw me
striding down the streets in confidence past curfew,
searching for the specter
that now joyfully envelopes my frail frame
as I write this, hoping that no one should care
where my body or my soul might go, if to heaven
or to be baked into necklaces and ivory in hell,
because the reality might be too painful
to bear alone, and we are all trapped
in these pitiful rooms with no legs
(the knees shot out from under us by angry guards)
to let us escape.

I came to the well in the middle of the pasture
infested by cow dung and unpasteurized milk
to throw my 1989 penny in (marked "the era of change"),
lay down a threadbare checkerboard blanket
and lean back on the red carpet as the voice
cascades out from the water's surface,
whispering to me from the oily depths
the sob stories of the desperate, the old, the young,
and those men speaking of the scars in their hearts
as they sip beer at the bar counter and smile,
shooting jokes about lack of commitment and faith
while tears shoot out through their skin, nose,
anywhere but the eyes, as nobody would like rocks
chucked at their windows.

And, in particular, it told to me the tale
of a man on crutches, hair graying, voice quivering,
now hovering only two inches above the pale earth,
shouting his lengthy demands that the world
appease his aching adobe body in some new way;
by granting him a slightly more magical earth,
where the woman hover gently above the ground
as they pour libations over drying tomato plants
(he never did like the taste of bitter, sundried tomatoes
that mirrored him with every second that he stared).
Maybe in which his cousin, the surgeon and body-builder,
might also serve as a psychologist too, peering into him
and breaking apart, analyzing his feelings on his mother,
the man who sat crying upon the auburn rocks,
and the locks of waterlogged hair on the tree
that held her body like a noose would.

Maybe, just maybe, a world composed
of a few more ounces of peace in the universal recipe,
where the ground could not rear up like a bear
to taint the smell of peaches with that of iron
and let Mother Nature have a final, painful laugh
before being consumed by the mouths of cows,
she replaced by disease and infectious muck
swamping the world as it did my horror-stricken eyes
on that fateful day by the half-destroyed well
when a phonecall told me of the illness of my niece.

This flight of stairs extends forever,
as my walking up it for hours has proved;
the walls taunt at me with projections of hands
pulling at my coat from cat-imprint wallpaper
as distant melodies sound off from behind me,
a Gatling gun of a children's lullaby
sung by the voice of the darling young lady
whose ghost now shimmers in front of the lamp
that hovers above my face, pouring out light
to reveal the scars on her head,
across her eye, and on the stake-impaled palm
that stretches out in greeting towards mine,
her mouth moving, emanating wordless echoes
that rattle my bones like maracas and force me
to cry out if she ever knew the man in the hallway
and why he came for her on that second
Saint Valentine's Day Massacre.

"I wasn't shot," I shout, more in frustration
induced by a bong and two hours of a fever dream
where I was trapped in Oceania, and had to submit
to the will of Big Brother pulling out my heart
and playing its strings while forcing me to deny
that I had ever done anything other than take the bullet
in a heroic sacrifice that had still managed to fail
when the dastardly cur from a foreign country
used a gun with a caliber too high for my body
and hers - as much a comfortable pillow it could be
to sleep on, I could feel and smell the pea
beneath it. And so I kept on shouting, knowing
the truth and the way it shot through me with claws
of the lion that had been so afraid to go to the wizard -
"I was there, I was standing right behind you,
but I wasn't shot, and not a drop of blood of mine
fell on the ground, and I wasn't fucking shot,
and I watched you die for me, and I couldn't see him,
I couldn't see that bastard hiding in the shadows,
and he took the opportunity to shoot you, because
I know he waited for the first person to come
to invoke his infinite rage, and I wasn't at the front
like I should've been, for your safety, so I wasn't shot, I
wasn't shot, I wasn't shot, he didn't strike me
and leave me to die instead of you."

In that moment when our hands, from across worlds,
finally linked, I wanted as you ignored
the outstretched hand waiting for its companion,
as you moved your fingers across my face,
gently tickling my whiskers as you placed one
world-weary thumb into my temple, pulling it out
and waving its bloody impression in my face
In your singing, your sorrowful expression,
and the sympathy that coated you like gauze
over translucent skin, I could hear words floating
in the air - "the two of you have met before;
I have known you both, and I wish
I could have been behind you, embrace you,
and let that demon descend beneath us
so that his rage might join the endless supply
in a fiery lake, and be lost to us forever."

I was born among stout trees, and
I will likely die of them here,
as now I slowly suffocate in my bedroom,
holding the match over burnt fingers
while flames spew black-and-white socks
onto the ground in front of me,
eating apart drawers that I had own drawn
a smiling face upon, and handwriting
from a ten-year-old declaring, in crayon,
"this is my room, and mine alone,
brother - leave me to my pillow forts
and toy dinosaurs."

As I am choked by colored wax pieces
someone bangs on the door,
shouting an indecipherable language
composed of tears and garbled words
as I watch sparks emanate
from a shattered socket struck
by a murderous sledgehammer,
spewing discordant electric notes
as I watch the blue spray-painted wall
in front of my weary and lifeless face,
having set the hammer against the door
and a ticking clock by the window latch.

Notes and reports and bad grades,
and the frowns of ruthless teachers attached to them,
now alight in the trash can,
burning away those little ties,
disapproving faces, strikes with rules,
and the flowerpot thrown at my head by my father,
so their charred, bellowing remains
might finally drown in the overflowing tub
combined with sinks spewing out lead-tainted water
over towels and ancient, moldy toothbrushes
like the way I nearly sank
in that swimming pool 10 years ago,
when my old man threw me in
with a leaden weight on my back -
his tried and true method
for, at best, learning to swim,
or, at worst, offing unwanted offspring.

I can hear the sirens now,
chanting an alluring call, pleas
of security if I choose to stay,
as the lady in the hallway demands
(shoes now waterlogged with agony),
in this mortal plane for any longer.
"Johnny, this is my room, and mine alone,"
I shout in frustration
as I hear an ax chopping into wood,
tears dripping down my face seconds
before I take the red can
and dump its contents all over my body,
step onto the water as it now rushes
towards the enigmatic collapsing socket,
and strike the match against the box,
hoping that the salt in my eyes won't diminish
the heat.

It is not that I find my brain
the offending part of myself anymore,
but the vocal cords, and the way
that the devils emanate lyrical poison
to contaminate the ears and force their hammers
to slam down upon the mind and wipe out tears
streaming bloody treason onto the ground
before my sluggish, old mind can realize
what murders had been committed
in a slip of the tongue.

As such, I would be happy to remove them
by force, if that were to involve slamming myself
on the asphalt that I once scarred my knees and elbows with
when I whirled carelessly through a field and tripped,
so that I might only be forced to speak in whispers,
their touch lost in waves of silence and breathlessness
that consume and destroy all offending thoughts
(and perhaps those that do not, but their infrequency
worries me little);
or have my lungs weakened enough
breathe little at all, much less say anything of import,
and strap me into a machine where I can lay down in,
where I will never cause harm to anyone else
save the stressed and weary man keeping
a meaningless system running for however much longer,
until even it can serve me for no longer
(as much as the alternative would be simpler,
less painful, and have the same results.)

It was not a golden field of amber
that would scratch at our backs or taunt us
about our lack of color under the sun
(save for the red painted around heart tattoos,
as though the ventricles had decided to leak
and their counterparts joined the scheme);
nor was it a junkyard full of broken glass,
an angry old man chasing us with his broom
and demanded that he strike out impure thoughts
by either his hand or that paw of the massive dog
growling, hackles raised, preparing to snap legs
and take names that would land on the obituaries,
of the affairs and children that could've been.

No, it was a quiet street corner, with the rain
raining down gently over our heads, soaking hair
over our eyes so that we couldn't see the apartments
looming precariously and weakly over our heads,
their occupants living normal lives by walking up or down
(having long ago found a small tilt good for the health,
no matter what safety inspector came along with predictions
of a quick and dramatic death on top of natural gas lines).
Only the light of a yellow lamp hovered over us
as we placed our feet on the edge of the road
and dared each other to stay there the longest
before a car would smash our limbs against the pavement
so that our feet might no longer be constrained in shoes,
but in asphalt.

And we held hands, ignored the silence of storefronts
with curtains closed, no pedestrians passing by,
some declaring the comedy being finished in their signs,
so that we might stare at the empty intersection
flickering life, aging, and death against the comedy
of fading lights and withering ignored spots on the ground,
and believe that, for once, despite our bad talents,
we truly could dance in the rain.

What we discover in the fire
(lit by our discontent in the attic
after an afternoon spent searching
for those few pictures in black frame
testifying to the somber dress
of young men and women uneager
to sit behind the wheel and place
their untrustworthy foot
over a fearing pedal and brake,
as though we could break the glass
and wipe away the years of sour memories
so that we may only think that we thought
that the years would only get better)
should not remain with us, charred metal
and lumps of old picture-frames stuck to us
in a desperate reproduction strategy
known as burrowing in by each of our headaches
and stabbing at our electrified minds
to be absorbed in the movie reels of memories
broadcast in dark rooms to frightened children
holding each other as dreadful words spew out
and lead them to say, "may we never suffer
the same way, father."

Yet, if it must be said, those hours rummaging
among roof insulation and heat deposits,
that you and I are happy to find those images
of caramel birthday cakes, late-night conversations,
and realizations that hurdles can be run through
in a brazen cavalry charge with few, if any, casualties,
as much as the light-drenched photos are infrequent
and the splinters of broken barriers spread into our eyes
(but we can always pluck them out as we see fit,
because why can't we trust on the other person
to see the log positioned between our eyebrows?)

It was nestled behind flaming tires,
broken glass that serrated my feet
and the solemn realization
that you wouldn't come back to hold my hand
and yank me up the flight of stairs any longer,
but I finally found what you wrote on the wall
in the cheap lipstick you had bought
and were given by the shady dealer in the mall
who looked like he was taking part in a drug deal,
all to see what kind of impression
you could leave on my forehead and mind.

Hearts didn't suit your fancy,
so you decided to rim it with zigzags
expanding outwards like the lightning
that you had hoped to channel
to control the world, starting with my hair
and then the rest of my pathetic body,
jerking me around into whatever posture
that would allow you to stand atop me
and then to dispel my fear of hugging,
even if it could take a month to do so;
I couldn't bear to scratch out "madness" at the end,
so I grabbed a small rock and chiseled under it
"but i loved it," and I wanted to say
that I loved being your stepping stone, every one
you could use to take you into the sky,
raising me with you as though I was your stone wings,
your one challenge to defy and expand
with an overtaxed energy supply
(and I wish I could have given you more).

But, in sixteen years, I had already said enough.

My favorite scenes are the ones
in which the blackness of a storm
(coming to blanket the land in hail,
bolts of lightning, and shattered trees
whose splinters impale cows
and litter the bottoms of public pools
to terrorize the feet of young children)
mixes with a sun fearful,
blessing the sky a shade of blue
that, as my mother states
while I walk with my family
(cynical enough to move quickly
to escape the dark gray eclipse),
becomes all the richer
as the sea and its chariotmaster alike
cower and retreat in light of the gale
looming over their poor heads.

Alternatively, I love it when nightmares come
after the sun has flipped us off
in a purple and red middle finger
that slips into a navy blue uniform
as though the void of the distant universe
was finally seeping in, conspiring
with billowing snow clouds to bury us all
in a torrent of mud, though, for now,
it remains the color of the frostbite
that littered your skin when you came back
from your two year long journey to the North Pole
sans your legs, regaling me
by noting how few elves reside in that place,
how the toymaker had long ago hidden himself
within the depths of a frosty hellhole,
and how you saw the most brilliant skies
when they lacked any color palette at all.