Young Writers Society

17.

[missed a day but hey here's a super long poem, half of which was written by the lovely @SirLight]


12 excuses for unrequited love

You have only made me miss
a bus-stop. Today.
It wasn't you, of course,
but the way you smiled at me.
A tiny smile trapping my eyes
to stay with you.

last night, i couldn't sleep
because the irises in your eye
reminded me of the way magicians
distort reality and i am already
entranced

In the morning, your voice,
so powerful in its softness,
like the breeze passing by
under the hot sun, made me lose myself
again.

i didn't watch the evening skies, dusk sieving through the horizons
like the tea we share after the dinner, i didn't trace
the movement of clouds, thinking of the palpitations
of your heart

Do you remember of the night we spent
lying at the backyard, watching the sky sparkled
with its heavenly bodies? I only remember the feel of
your breath, whispering every constellations you could capture.

there is a story in the constellations, and i am reading it like the
back of my hand, but every time i open this book
comes with the stark reminder that you were the one who taught me how to read

Does unrequited love have its place between two people,
each of them keeping Cupid in their heart? Can I ask you to be my Psyche
through silence? Why is it that my admiration of the way you march through the trials
is a double-edge sword that stops me from confessing the truth?

for every word we exchange, there is a crusade of stifled musings
i am asking for a way out of this castle where you're the King and i am the
damsel in distress. except, last night when i was asleep someone put out all the lights
and the brightest thing in this room, is when moonlight glides through the window
and settle on your teeth

When despair clung at me as strong as the past did, when broken glasses
and a crying boy flashed through my mind, you slapped me. You dragged me to the present
and showed me the rainbow in the sky and the butterflies flying high.
Your hand held me tight and I knew what I held was happiness.

in another world, where train tracks don't break in a collision
i held your hand and our skin were glass, veins flowed
and none of us had to cut the other person just to see, what was inside
to verify that our feelings weren't an illusion born from loneliness

You didn't bother to hide the tremble in your voice when we were in the dark.
You were you. Sometimes you stumbled when you walked
and you would just laughed at life. You were always within my reach as you
didn't build a shell around you.

in this lifetime, though, we do not have star for hearts
and there is no salvation at the end of the road waiting for us, in this lifetime
we are the only ones who can save ourselves by jumping off the tracks
together

18.

hiraeth

I am the most homesick I have ever been
sitting here with you at midnight trying to save our fate in the constellations (we’re fighting against entropy) because love is battleground and the winners,
are the ones drenched in a sky of red (but who’s to say, what’s red and what’s not)
this summer, our lungs are breathing. but our hearts are dead.

we were both looking for Orion in the summer sky, because home was
knowing, the formation of fallen stars that hit the earth, lighting up the atlas of soil beneath my feet but now
all I see, are the outlines of your footprints framing the corners of my sky

we are racing down the road,
my heart is thumping with the hollow reverberations of a forgotten prayer.
like that time, the time before, and the time before that
but this time, as your shadow flies past me, veins fraying beneath your skin
i won’t cut myself open just to heal your wounds.

um, excuses for unrequited love is a crazy, sad, and amazing roller coaster ride -- I am up, and then I am back down, and I love it because it is so true to life.

also -- so many stars!

19.

Playing it by ear
ft @Autumns


we are waiting for
the dawn of our childhood again, sitting on the sun-baked bricks
we're five again and lemonade drips from the half-melted icypop onto the ground.
back then, there is a song we used to sing and its melody is etched into our hearts
the way sunlight greets the sky in the morning, with the low thrum of a kettle boiling water. and our mother told us, we were all born with sunflower seeds in our hearts
and the blood of an eternal summer ran strong in our veins.
she told us, how we were the branches of a tree she once planted
some deciduous hardwood, leaf-shedding in the autumn,
part of a larger canopy, yet lonely as a pine on a snowy peak

we are waiting for the dawn of our childhood again, except we're 25 and
the soles of our feet are weathered pavements, cracked over the years, clouds are shedding layers and we've ran out of straws to sip the precipitation back into our system.
this is a song we're singing to, but we're playing it by ear
ad libitum, it's a ride, we don't know the words but we're looking
rummaging through a dried up vocabulary, salvaging the remnants of meaning in jars of preserved cranberries wrung by summer's sleeves
there is syntactic difficulty between the transgression of seasons and ages, a misplaced sense of reality
in the liminal shades of hand-dyed fabric strung on racks beneath the transience of the winter sun.
we're the beginning and the ending of a classic motion picture
but we're mostly the fleeting frames of film in between
rolling, dancing as light passes through us, we turn to projections on a screen
never really captured, always one dimension lesser, always some depth lost to the canvas
between the moment of inception and comprehension
a divide never bridged,

some equations do not begged to be solved,
an asymptotic dance of variables and unknowns,
so we just hold on to the constants and make do with half-solutions
we lose ourselves to the saccadic rhythm of asking and never quite ending up with answers
only the light sieved through a withering atmosphere,
a kaleidoscope miscollection of hearts travelled too far, where the roads all lead back to home.

20.

monsoon season

hey, listen. i hear there is a monsoon up north,
and they're telling stories of how the wind stalked through a city at night, snuffing out streetlights one by one, (this is the blackout before the Grand heist)
(this is the second derivative before the gradient reaches zero)

up north,
they're telling stories of how the monsoon captured a girl with a litmus paper heart.
the soil is acidic there, the air alkaline.
and her heart is an immiscible dilution of obscure sorrows, lukewarm welcomes and half-hearted departures because,
it's always hurried before the storm uproots everything to its marrow.

yes,
summer is still root-deep in our blood, but it is monsoon season and the locomotions in our hearts are brewing humidity in our veins.
we can no longer go on pretending the skies are clear, whilst tornadoes hackle rooftops when we wake in the morning.

21.


the average human heart in a minute
beats 60 times.
except for the duration of time we spent together
where it is a strenuous machine
avoiding cardiac arrest

22.

ft AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA (@Autumns)


we end up without a kingdom

remember our summer nights, neon digits ticking down the
polyester covers and staining the windows with warm incandescence
you whispered into my ear, in Shaharzade's voice
and told me how you wanted to pluck each moment, pluck it like a grape from the vines of time
relish the tanginess and the sweetness of nascent wine
while we drink up each others' history like an intoxicant
and lose the concept of 'you' and 'me'
to a singular history
where the kings are queens and the pawns the king. even if
we were raised with a checkerboard detailing the delineation of all things

time rides on the back of a Mongolian horse
it is lost in the haze of the Steppe's dust,
a fractured terrain, mountain ridges like ligaments divorced of their veterbrae,
we're riders, trying to find the edges of our continents
because we've heard how the sea sparkles in the sun
and we want a sip of its elixir, even if we know that the more we drink of it
the more thirsty we'll end up coughing up epilogues
on the shores watching the tide recede,
we think we are conquerers, but our fortresses are just sandcastles
our empires are like cracks in an old woman's skin

we end up without a kingdom, six feet underneath the surface
where the cries of glory stifles into static silences, this is a terracotta army
of clay soliders, our courtiers skeletons shows 5000 years of history but the
walls are deaf and eyes are turned upwards to
opulent cities, now ghost towns where
the pillars hold up the structure of each crumbling edifice.


~


∞

I want you to unravel like a scroll
and read you the way the earth beckons the moon - a celestial dance
of satellites and planets, comets trailblazing the cosmic skyline,
this is our ballroom, hold my hand and spin on your axis
the seasons are braille charted to the rhythm of our breathing
we'll go from orbit to orbit, unsettling stardust in our wake
pull me into your galaxies, tiptoe across the tightrope of a light year
collecting vials of scintillations from the aerolites along our trail
and a universe in each of your exhalations, constellations in the beads of sweat on your upper lip
we will make the world rewrite astronomy,
to match the rhythm of our revolutions.

23.


i.

chemically imbalanced
ft @Autumns


18+ Language
18+ Content
18+ read at your own risk



ii.

untitled
ft
@Autumns, @Lightsong

walk with me along the aisles of centuries
where history records the presence of love in stories
stroll through the corridors of musings, museums of recollections
our love is the prime of a new renaissance, every dawn an enlightenment reenacted,
an epoch in the making, the fruition of an art-form where
every thought is a point of reference, so
I can sculpt you in stone, save you in the frescoes I paint
from cave walls to palace murals, I'lll paint you, I will
tie you to the strings of a lute and play a tune with my fingers tiptoeing on across your skin,
carve your name in every song, paint it across the cornerstones of civilisation,
but every time it ascends to a whisper and blend with the wind
i bleed and bleed and bleed,
ending the performance in silence. and without you.

24.

tourist attraction


i’ve forgotten the days of the week
the planets must have slept wrong in the long winter,
because now there is a crevice in the sky where the sun used to be.

there is unrest on the streets,
fishnet clouds that have gone into the heads of the wrong people, prostitutes
thinking they are queens of the world (until their head is decapitated to mark the start of
a brand new era).
history is everything until it isn’t, but no one cares enough to distinguish the two anyways.

12pm,
i slept in again and i can taste the remnants of last night’s love-making
like the half-sour taste of milk gone bad.
this city was once mine, but now street names float up in my cereal in the morning, but all i taste is the bland flavour of
tea leaves used too many times.
they’re holding a free tour guide down south, they’re telling the story of how Britain conquered the world (and you were here for the memorial service).

i’m told over and
over
and over again how my body is a temple,
except you too, will know it better than i ever did.
your pious devotion is the intermission between each exhalation, fingers buried deep inside my hair, summer nights spent detailing
the annals of centuries of goddesses that have lived inside my body.
up on my altar, i could almost pretend this was love, if only i didn’t know
(i was just another reincarnation for you to burn your incense to).

25.

pottery, when glazed
can appear to be unbroken
from a distance.

a square, add enough sides
can appear to be a circle
from a distance.

can we shorten the distance between us
given enough threads
to join the wounds together?

26.



i’m laughing in the middle of our shower,
but not for the reasons you think.
the water reminds me of deciduous leaves in autumn,
dawn skies laced with crimson gold.

this is what our love is.
a montage of crisp dry cider, heat-stroken words left in the open air
to effervesce
because we were too busy drawing maps on each other’s bodies
to places we’ll never get to go.
but we always want what lies outside the fortress, otherwise
how would we ever make it out of the garden?

27.

i want to leave this town,
pack my bags and leave
everything behind. our love is a scrapbooked tinderbox,
falling apart as we try to keep both of us warm. (and failing)

the skyline is the same everywhere,
who cares if i'm standing at revelation and you're diving through
damnation

28.

find me a home,
i have breed enough silkworms, to trade for a heart of spice
i am sick of having mulberry bruises on my heart every single time you pluck a fruit from my tree without asking,
juices are staining my fingers red to the point where everything i touch turns into a cesspool of bloodied bodies reaching for oblivion

someone is brewing tea in the kitchen, three pm chai with a dose of smile around the rim, whilst the wind is ripping me apart
as i reach for the newborn leaves to keep you sustained

find me a home, because
i am sick of this place and it's time to cut the strings
loose

29.

let’s go-
both of our roots have been scraped into atlantis skies
sinking beneath continents of thoughts

there is a chink in the armour, but sunlight isn’t getting through
and oxygen is slowly rusting our bones into wasted china
destined for the landfill

let’s go-
before this ship sinks and we’ll both end up
as maidens who didn’t float

There are so many wonderful lines in here Apricity, your poetic voice also has a consistency; like you could really read all or most of these as part of a cohesive collection. The way you describe the body through imagery and elegant metaphors is memorable.

I love this: summer is still root-deep in our blood, but it is monsoon season and the locomotions in our hearts are brewing humidity in our veins.

and this: "pottery, when glazed
can appear to be unbroken
from a distance"

and also this: "and oxygen is slowly rusting our bones into wasted china
destined for the landfill "