Young Writers Society

with them

#1

I can do anything!
poster on the wall
dripping this elegy
on to the thick carpet
seems endless,
an escher of bricks
and kindy hand paintings.
a room designed to make you
Feel
one way or the other about
Something
all the while the mannequin
drones across the desk
or falls asleep in slow motion
and you're left picking at clumps
of misbegotten confidence
still mashed into the floor.


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#2

Everything I've ever said I've done
has had would be should be could be
lying grotesquely beneath.
the stench of the missing clings
in the cloisters of my potential;
the points of which stab erratically
and effortlessly into consciousness.

this is solemn, the reminder.
and i wonder if i had been different.
i had been so different.

i don't know who i was.

deep in me the rafters reverberate
with a thousand hymnals

i don't know who i am

anymore.

#3

i wake gasping
my hair Wrapped around my throat

It is so Nice
Long hair is so beautiful
Never cut it!

i wake choking
My hair wrapped around my throat

i Peel hair from my clothes
from the sink
my chair

i find myself Startled by an insect
that was only hair
long and fine
settled on my forearm
like that is where it belongs

i wake so tired

scars around my neck

adverse to cutting

i wake

Still

#4

i am so tired
time leaks from my bones
onto the hardwood floors.
my bedroom is coffin quiet,
curtains drawn and brooding,
perfect conditions to close eyes and
sleep eludes me.
when time bends and crackles
into my joints in the morning
i wonder where it found the energy
to make movement
supple and raw
an enemy of my dreams.

#5

Good times are tv and ice cream
Pokemon in the park
Driving further than anticipated
For a sudden delicious lunch

on a whim

we make our days worth having
collecting heat inside our lips
as the cloudless sky kisses
our begging faces
Just One More Time
before we head home.

#6

i am i am i am

i am trying to write about

You.

In fact i have written it twice.
Once down the corridor to my room,
and again when I brushed my hair out,
plaiting it quickly, deliberately.

But now You see i am paused;
nothing of what i thought is on the page,
or even in my minds eye.

Perhaps You defy the writing.
Perhaps i am Cassandra and
You are the fate of the world -
i could tell the story that would never be heard.
i would tell that story if i could find the words.

What does anyone need to know
of what i think i mean to You?
They already know Your place
in this parthenon - the pillar, the standing -
is it anything to know of the rest?

In the writing is a moment,
clarified amber, hosting a single entity
that defies decay

and in that moment i see You.

Nothing of this signifies to an audience
who cannot know Your name,
they have only these falling words
that mount and clamour and rage
to tell a story that can't be told,
a moment that hasn't ended,
an entity.

And

i am trying to write a poem
though i have nothing
so stay

#7

Some days seem so slow to begin
I wait for them in the hallway,
watching the thin yellow thicken
against the hardwood boards,
outside the birds are waking
and the rumble of traffic kicks up.

Today it was swift and shadowed,
grey clouds playing against the rooftops,
filtering the morning into sections
(awake and not yet and oh god morning)
when the realisation of a forgotten alarm
settles drowsily against your eyelids and
Up! Up the sun and up your weary limbs.

Yes some mornings are slow to begin,
but today is not one of them.

#8

I want to give my heart to someone
But it is so heavy it drags on the floor
And a momentary deadlift will not save it

So i let friction grow in order to keep
The waiting hands at bay and they can exclaim
It is always a shock to see her heart so low

And protection is protection
Even when you can't see it
Or feel it take hold.

#9

I am work weary.
My fingers have worn to the born,
stubby nubs bleeding in their gloves.
I feel constant with it,
the need for moving forward and
"getting it done"
as though everything we're ever doing
isn't going somewhere.
and time is an illusion
and we can't prove we exist
but I still have to eat
and sleep
and live.

#10

I wonder what the reader expects
From me
My poems are sometimes confessions
And others are entirely fiction
The thinnest of lines between,
Always the tightrope of plausible deniability.
I am an acrobat then,
But more the magician
When my readers cannot tell which the mirror,
Which the real.

I dont know what my readers think of me
And i like it that way

#11

I have nothing to say
this day or the next

said the poet to the novelist
taking turns each week
to whinge and whine and
divulge the secrets of the trade

though still the words find their way
typed and scrawled and spoken and punctured
until a thing emerges
unlike any other, every other,
and so too the reader comes to know -

i have nothing to say.

#12

I am moving home again,
the boxes packed and repacked
as the chill sets into Autumn.
We are glad the oppressive heat
no longer sinks tooth and claw
into our tired backs,
this cold is welcome to sweaty hands.
The next place will be as this one,
temporary, a hold out until -

What is home anyway?
No simile or metaphor,
no idiom, no oxymoron,
just our searching eyes,
and the words that fail
to meet them.

#13

** Blessed are the Meek
When you are young you think the world is yours. It lingers there, the knowledge of your own divinity like a quiet pressure between your eyebrows. The social faux pas of existence lays there too, though you were incorporeal until the moment you questioned it. Age doesnt change this, nor does time. You shed, reptilian scales leaving a path behind you like so many bread crumbs something may eat. Those, the moments of you left behind,
They Shall Inherit the Earth.**

#14


Cacophany -
the clatter of your arrival at the front door, keys and bag and
the sound of your shoes on the new tile floor,
Im Here, Welcome Home, Come Help,
These Bags are So Heavy!
I used to live alone, even with roommates,
now I cant sleep if youre not next door,
vibrations of your radio sinking into my dreams
so loud.

Bonus: written with Hannah


looking up the sky is gray and leaking, but so so far away it is blue.
I watch the mountains form there, fists full of crushing cloud
crowns of gold beneath and pushing up, up, into
the space beyond, a faith-filled endeavour that asked
for more empty days and faint breezes.
let us rest. "Let us pray"