Young Writers Society

7.i


family portrait

in a family of six, we all have black hair, brown eyes
and blood running through our veins
i am not a painter and i can't capture all the pigments in their faces
or the hairline fractures beneath their eyes in the morning suburban
jungle

i can only tell you
how, our breathes spun like revolving tops
drawing cathedrals through the fog
as sunlight rearranges itself out of our hands and called for praying, burning itself
in a pool of moonlit skin

twice in a decade of endless repetition,
176 times we tried for redemption, tripping
over the flats, breaking the fissures on our chests by slicing it with the sharps, to nurture the ground with salt, again
and
again
because this is how we make family history, in a waltz of eternal damnation,
we're a circus wagon interpreting the sky, our history is found in spells, in the brilliant (and devastating) transformation of tectonic plates:
an image of the things they never were

8.i


this morning i woke
with the taste of blood in my mouth, and the leftover
of last night's kisses like anaesthetic numbing the metallic flavour in my mouth
we went into the darkroom yesterday, and i taste an air full of chemicals,
you pressed me against the sinks and i wrecked havoc in that dark room with my body, because it was the only solid thing i had

i woke up today
because the sunlight
blanked out
all the negatives i swallowed last night, and time
has started flowing once more

8.ii

prompt stolen from @Nikayla's poem during poetry jamming

the bible is a stranger to me


last night, you told me a story of when
Moses leaves the sacred temple,
the sun whitened into iron-laced verandahs where eve called out for adam
how his damnation was her termination, for every image needed
a shadow

9.

18+ language/content

i rip another page of the calendar, ink stains my fingers with the numbered days
a tally counter of “how are you?”
always the reply of ‘i am fine, i am fine, i am fine’
(fine like grounded coffee with the burnt aftertaste of streets being raped by the sun) and
i am the child who danced in the rain thinking it was silver bells.
even after all these years, even if my skin is marked with burns the size of helium balloons
i ingest the gas hoping one day it’ll carry me far enough where the streets aren’t coffins masquerading as survivors
and i am no longer a child with a false immunity to burns

10.

untitled creds to @Nikayla for one line prompt

we are
salt-rimmed openings at 5am, trying to pry the sky open except
you're asleep and i am listening to the echoes of your breathing in this room, it is my warcry in this blood-dimmed tide, the onslaught of light across your face (is this how lucifer felt when he fell from the sky)
except i am the only spectator to their futile quarrels; i see
a volcano rising in the horizon. in the crimson undertone of a dawn waiting for the absence of darkness; and the ashes
are settling on my bones, an age-old chant indenting the ladders of my spine,
temples resurrect themselves upon my chest, in the morning
i hear whole centuries of worshippers inscribing their despair in the hallowed halls of my heart; and i am drowning in the empty reverberation of their cries of 'i am i am i am'

we are
salt-rimmed openings at 5am, i taste the volcanic ashes of a damned civilisation on my tongue [help me ] and you are
sound asleep

10.i

medicinal cabinet


tell me a story, i say
because painkillers only numb the visible wounds and i’ve ran out of coins
to buy them from the cornershop. (they don’t sell gauze pads and the neighbours are complaining about the crimson flowers they keep seeing at night), there is
a bullet in my heart, but if i take it out i die.
so
now i am a living cavitation of shattered breastbones and shrapnels the size of a cathedral, the veins are breathing out the sound of rupture,
(and i am waiting for the arrival of the expiry date; one pulse at a time)
tell me a story, i say
because the embers burn longer with more wood

11.
letter for visitors


Hey, so and so
I heard you came looking for me today
but I wasn't home ( I never am these days)
but by now you should know, I only leave the lights on so people don't show up in funeral attire

Look out the train window, I'm there in the sky with a fishing pole of laurel; i am waiting
for the inferno on earth to disappear
so i can perform a safe landing when i’ve ran out of stars to fish

I like your last poem for the sort of dialogue/monologue it uses in the first stanza as lines and I found that to be used in a unique way. Nice job on that!

12.

wintersummersummerwinter


in my backyard, together we planted tomatoes and basils, mints and thyme
they're the ingredients in which fairytales come from, where the plots are charted in accordance to the direction of the sun
this was in the summer of ‘98, where sweet corn ice creams melted into the pavement of our hearts, and happiness was found in the bottle of 20 cent soda cans
fizzling like sorbet on our tongues (and there wasn’t a bitter aftertaste afterwards)

when you left
you took summer with you and now the garden
have sunken into a perpetual winter;
the soil sings a dull lullaby of a cracked land aching for rain,
here, overgrown weeds mute pulses like poison, one cell at a time
until static dandelions scream murder across the radio abyss

this is the summer where all my lovers are breathing under water
this is the summer with the lifespan of a winter

you NaPo thread makes me weak <3

@primadonna <3 and you make me all flustered and happy

13.

theater


this is a movie, so please turn off your phones
(before the ads begin)
(before the brightness of screens reminds me of the way how memories
swarm like insects to kerosene)
turn off your phone,
so your face is doused in darkness and i can pretend
the map in your eyes doesn’t exist; i can pretend
i didn’t lose myself in there mistaking love for a destination glowing like fireflies flickering in the summer heat,
i can pretend
that my soul is still intact and it wasn’t traded in a haze of 3am4am5am conversations
-they swirl like baileys every morning i open my eyes;
thinking the world was still warm (even when you’re not here), you are just a handful of cells, just
an another amalgamation, just another-

and i am
out of words.

i am out of words, and this is a movie.
so please turn off your phone
(because the brightness hurts too much, it reminds me of
how sunlight is bent through honey. but you'd used to cover my eyes (and everything was softer when viewed through a kaleidoscope)
and how, the viscosity
of it somehow deafens everything else.)

this is a movie, we're no longer ourselves
turn off your phone, close your eyes, so i can pretend
i never dived in with eyes closed, believing i could swim back to the shore.

I love the medicinal cabinets one, with the words you've used and the story you're telling. <3

14.

7 milliseconds


00:07
the human retina takes 7 milliseconds to process light, we are forever
7 milliseconds behind; falling through the rabbit hole with eyes shut

00:06
this is the apocalyptic now, seconds fall like cogs off the blinds
when i shut them in the morning; sunlight trickles through not because it wants to
but because, this is clockwork (engineered to rise in the east and set in the west)

00:05
there is a tsunami in my head when the hands move, the seconds
wash against the walls of my skull - this is catastrophe disguised as
beauty: moonlight caressing your burning lips
through the window.

00:04
i’m forgetting what time before you looked like, is the sky the colour of a
molten glass bubble or is it, the blanched blue cover of a capsule
i’m forgetting, in the 7 milliseconds it took for your light to hit my eyes,
what the world looked like before it was kaleidescoped into lakes of light.

the cements are breaking, with each and every exhale i make
after all the roads i’ve travelled, i did not anticipate this
pas de deux i would have with you
and how somewhere along the
way, your gravity became
the centrifugal tension
holding me together
this is your captain
speaking,prepare
for impact in
3,2,1

00:00

15.

farewell

we are uncharted minefields. detonation awaits
in the space it takes to say good morning, good evening, in this time of dismal droughts
the vibration in your larynx coaxes the springs inside of me to well up
and repair the metropolises of fractures that rise like ridges
along the length of my spine, i am Rome’s ghost since her decease
and i wonder when you press your ear against my chest, whether you can hear
the elegiac tune in between the pulses




-first line provided by Shinji Moon, also a Robert Browning reference