Young Writers Society

it's easy to be hollow.
you see this body? yes, it is
a skeleton wrapped in the skin of
a man with too much time
on his hands. i am sitting here, alone,
with aching knuckles and
sore knees. i used to
tell prophecies about how
the world will end when we all
discover how infinite
we will never be.
human kind has an expiration
date long overdue.
seven years and the world
will be hollow too, and i call home
to a cracking ribcage, a
broken man in his lonesome
drowning in himself.
and it's alright for us to
destroy ourselves like this,
only if it's for the best.

to whom it may concern:

i'm writing you regarding your last letter. yes, you're right; we haven't talked in a while. somewhere along finding my way home, i let myself go, and i think i've gotten worse. i became the monster i told you i'd never awaken; the ghoul in the walls all on his lonesome, calling out to you familiar words. two familiar fists upon one familiar skeleton. two familiar fists upon two familiar ghosts. two familiar fists upon those same familiar four walls.

please find enclosed my ribcage, for it is not only mine anymore. i have dusted my bones in preparation for this. i've seen it coming for decades.

sincerely yours,
eternity.

what is yours is mine too.
somewhere along the fault-lines,
i had internalized the vast vacancy
and how it has made its space in you.
honour takes its seat in my heart.
if you will cry yourself a sea,
fill my cup; a perpetuity
of grief upon this soul.

be kind, but not to yourself.

tide has risen its heaving head --
give this a chance; these bodies of
iron and salt are only borrowed.
the tide will return, and
the dead sea and its despair
keep us making promises
to the impression of company.

be kind. spare some for yourself.

there is something
waiting in the depths for you;
i will find you just as you find me.

the problem is that someone trusted me once.
this is somewhat dangerous knowledge
to have; you see, trust is as fallible as
the heart making eye contact. hearts are blind,
and love comes from under justice
because mercy is heavy enough
to weigh us down. i thought that maybe
this was something of an apology;
something of letting us have something
for ourselves, just this once.
so you blinked it off.
so maybe i was wrong.

this is the story
i have never stopped knowing.
there is so much to be happy about,
so much to celebrate.
these arms fear both
nothing & everything --
love, hate, seclusion, and so on;
love, hate, and the feeling of
actually feeling something for once.

(you know how it is.
i'm sorry. i'm sorry you have
to see it happen like this.)

there was a period of time
i was obsessed with remembrance.
it didn't last that long, but by the time
i stopped writing, the ink smudges ran up
to my arms like evening tide, so i had
made enough memories for a lifetime bigger than i was.
nothing ever amounts to much. to be
is to let go of all your past love because this (here, imagine me
opening up my arms) is how much we can have.

falling backwards in time is
because you don't deserve the future.
falling forwards in time is because life
can go on without you. no one needs to know
the peculiar mapwork of it, and you
weren't supposed to keep any of this for yourself.
writers are less selfish than undeserving.
there are grass stains on your jeans and you are submerged
and drowning; but there are petals in your hair.

it is past now,
but i mistook you for many shadows
that night. suddenly,
suddenly --
i was at the turning of the years,
seeing the vestiges of a dreamscape
i had not yet fallen into.
every day after seemed to break in supernovae,
as all my future selves stood with me
and watched the light come
of nothing
but a memory. morning, and all
the cosmic-common truths;
still dormant,
still true.

the body is a temple:

its halls
run long and deep. inlaid with precious
things, everywhere you touch has been blessed
with offering; all the rooms, marked with blood on the door.
it would take an age to uncover
every pearly mystery, and the greatest kings
are still looking.

this is what i dream of at night.
there is no gravity, so i drift along the
ceiling, watching the stars shimmer
through a stained-glass roof. there is light
in every corner; if you make a fist,
you can almost catch it.

everywhere
there was glass, and glass,
and more glass. telescopes and magnifying
lenses, all sorts of quiet reflections.
is this the place you were looking for?

i haven't been looking for anything.

falling in love with street-buskers isn't easy.
imagine a voice like pool lights at 9 p.m. and
then let the windows fog up and
trace wings on the glass.
when i say “easy’ i mean peaceful,
because you'd think a boy who sounds
like his own guitar, staggered chords, waterfalling,
can afford to slow down a pocket of time
with whatever higher power he held upon you --
a clench, eyelashes and hands coming to rest
to the drop-beat of the gasp,
the first look, blink.
no that's not
how you fall in love.

it's too much to chance;
you look at him like he is apollo
but that should be enough of a wake-up-call.
how can you drop pennies into
the well and ask to fly
for someone you lock-picked
your way to? there was no backstory to this
love-at-first-sight, not really an afterstory either,
just a record of someone lost who
took two lefts, one right, and turned
a corner before we got our happy-ever-after.
this should've been a one-shot kind of thing
but the story ran head-first into the deep end of the
ocean.

hours ago, there was a particular
projector-shine cast on your skin, turning on
and off as campfire flickered admonishingly,
tempting you away from the dream
sequence that was about to begin.
most of it comes to me in fractals here,
flaking off from the memory and flashing forefront,
blinking per countdown beat, like smoke following
the curl of your eyelashes in slow-motion, so you'll forgive me now.
if the slideshow doesn't run comprehensively, if the sequence occasionally falls flat before we move onto the next scene, maybe it could mean something.
hours ago we made a movie, a stop motion film.
of course, the film reels watch, hungry for chemistry,
for some pretense of development, from strangers,
to friends, to star-crossed lovers, so this became the kind of tagline.
the perfect rom-com needed, the throwback, a hook
pulling us into screen-worthy love; a fan-favourite,
ready for pop culture immortalisation.

the thing is, sometimes
our lives run on parallels.
sometimes we are train-track-
distance apart and the divide never
shrinks. sometimes you
race someone up a cliff and you both sing
your favourite song but neither
knows which line the other is at.
when we reach the peak, there is a whole
verse between us, galaxies moving
backwards in time, but
you know what: no one ever
said a pair of carved wings
will catch the wind better than a pair
without feathers. no one ever said
the paths would cross.