Young Writers Society

yeah why not

2016 - these are the words that are an offense to sanity (4/10, I don't take these poems seriously, but they don't take themselves seriously either)

2017 - How to Deal with the Buzzards Poking at Your Eyes (1/10, couldn't finish reading any of these. they're long, confusing, and pointless. no thanks)

2018 - the man beneath the lamppost (6/10, they're kind of melodramatic but whatever, starting to figure out my own style here)

2019 - sometimes I hear the bell ringing (7/10, I made some questionable decisions with some of these poems, but I still like the theme)

2020 - spring waits for no one (8/10, this one is solid, the equations are pretty funny, and I need to write more chemistry poems)

2021 - yeah I did napo. not on here, because those poems were pretty personal. I might throw a couple of them in this thread, for flavor.

-1. nostalgia (originally written February 28th, 2022)

[I wrote the second poem a day after the first one]

i. the glass behind the basketball hoop is broken -
cracks everywhere, a couple holes, about to shatter -
and for the life of me I don't remember
if that happened before or after
one of the million times I walked by it, and I forgot,
or if it was always like that
and I just never noticed it until now.

ii. the ground is choking on hundreds
of thick off-blue glass pieces
and I have to be careful where I walk
because I can see glass in the grass
on the other side of the tiny basketball field
and wedged into the melting snow
and on the concrete sidewalk
I'm following to get to somewhere better.

-1. the last time you can get away with that (originally written March 24th, 2022)

that kind of dissociative tired
where your eyes almost (but never quite) water
and your head doesn't hurt but
you can feel the muscles in your temples
twitch to the tune of your heartbeat, so you have
just enough brain fog to keep you
from thinking about what you have to do
or notice the to-do list getting longer
or worry about saying the wrong thing
to a stranger or friend or family member
because nothing matters that much
other than maybe watching a video
or sitting down at the dinner table
or seeing the leaves starting to bud,
and you almost want to spend
the rest of your life spacing out
because it's sounding like a much better deal
than all the job offers you don't have
and the conference you haven't been attending
and all the things you're letting slip
between your fingers (and it might be the last time
you can get away with that).

1. no one cares about

a couple times a day I'm walking by
a pair of glasses someone left in the parking lot,
and it looks a little more run over
every time I see it, with the frame
twisting into a flat piece of metal
and caving in on itself,
the glass itself having gone missing
a long time ago,
and little blue bits and pieces breaking off
like they're making a headstone for a grave.

and I'm getting kind of tired
watching it fall apart, but
if I want to do anything about it,
I'd have to stop for a second,
reach down, pick it up, and either
put it in my pocket, throw it into the grass,
or dump it in the trash bin behind me,
and all of those sound like
a little too much effort
for something that no one
seems to care about.

2. still trying (the iron lab)

i. I cried my ass off doing that lab -
I'd never been in a lab before that semester,
and I'd leaned on my partners
to weigh things out or pour water into beakers
in the last couple experiments,
so I ended up spending most of my time
soaking pipet bulbs and knocking vials over
and double-checking the same procedure
a couple dozen times like that was going to help me
measure things on a balance and dissolve solids and combine solutions
and fill to the line and set up a spectrophotometer
and measure concentrations that couldn't be accurate
because I'd already messed up so much by that point,
and I ended up getting a 10% grade in accuracy, and only because
I used the correct number of sig-figs in the report.
(because I at least tried to make sure
that I did what my teachers told me, and it turns out
I got an A in the report itself
because I was willing to explain why I messed up,
and that's come in handy a lot ever since).

ii. a year or two later I was in a group chat
talking about how stressed I was with o-chem
and that I couldn't make any product
and that I wasn't all that good at lab work,
and a friend in the same major asked me
why I was still doing chemistry.
I don't really know what I was expecting -
I'd typed all that because
I didn't want to admit that I just wanted
a hand on my shoulder and a reminder that maybe
I didn't have to figure it all out right away -
but yeah, I ended up walking out of a classroom,
turning down the hallway, finding a gap in the wall,
and crouching down in it while I texted her and said
that I still liked chemistry,
that I wasn't really sure what else I could do,
and that I wanted to keep giving it a try.

iii. I think I'm doing better now.
I'll still forget where the pipettes are,
or get a stir bar stuck
in the neck of a round-bottom flask,
or pick out random solvents
ignoring the reactions or solubilities involved
because nothing else has been dissolving my solute,
or accidentally contaminate some of my samples
because I couldn't tell colorless liquids apart
and I forgot to label them earlier.
but when I walk around campus,
I hear people talk about how much they hate chemistry
because of equations and formulas and rules
they don't have the patience to keep track of,
and I'm not blaming them, but I do have the patience,
because it's still fun to try and see
if I can make sense of some spectra
or recrystallize an unknown compound
or learn how to use some new piece of equipment
and push the boundaries of what I'm capable of doing,
little by little.

and, after four years,
I'm still trying.
I'm still a chemist.

3. her

(lol wrote this earlier today and forgot to post it)

I think I dreamed about you.
I don't remember
what it was about.

maybe we were sitting at our computers
halfway across the country apart
typing up stories on google docs
and watching the page count go up -
10, 20, 30, 40, and so on.
maybe I saw you walking away,
except I've never seen you before,
so maybe it was a shadow in the light,
somewhere deep in my head
the silhouette of something or someone
I've always thought looked like you.
maybe I just heard your name
and remembered it's been a few years
since we've talked.

I don't know where you are anymore,
and I don't know if you're alright -
I think I might be able to talk to you
if I play my cards right, but
maybe I'll end up talking to the wrong person
or I'll never hear back from you.
I hope you know where to find me
(it's not like I ever left),
and my door's always open
if you ever want to come in
and say hello.

4. used to being afraid

my motivation's like I'm
slamming the brakes then the gas
of a moving car
over and over again, because oooh,
I can watch a few videos
or I can plot a story
or there's some music I want to listen to
or I need to send some emails
or I should take another break
or I can't think clearly
or I need to get something to eat
or it's late and I should sleep,
and whatever I was going to do,
and however good it was to do,
the reasons start piling on top of each other
until I open the window
and suddenly it's night
and it's after midnight
and I have to give up on a good night's sleep
so I can lean over my desk
and write out some lab prep
or finish up a report
or answer a few questions
or study for an exam
or whatever I could've done
a few hours ago,
but was afraid to do
or figured it wouldn't take that long,
even after all the times I've taken a couple hours
and stretched it out to a couple weeks,
and I'll probably keep doing that
not because it's easier to be afraid
(because god what a waste of time and energy
feeling too warm or cold for my body
while my heart kicks into gear
and my brain thinks about things
I don't want to think about but need to
because oh no I only have a couple weeks
a few days a few hours maybe I should get to it
but I want to wait a little bit longer)
because I'm used to being afraid.

5. spring wind

(lol forgot to upload this)

the wind howling so loud
I can hear it whistling
through the cracks in the doors
of the rooms where people
left windows open,
and I can see it
shake the glass doors
to the balcony
like they're about to pop open
and I'll get dragged outside
if I get too close,
and I can feel it
when it picks up
and slams against the walls
roaring and rumbling
and screaming at me
for daring to be inside
in the light and the warmth
with my cozy hoodie
and my blankets,
like I almost think
I won't need to go outside
in a few hours.

-1. angewandte (originally written on december 13th, 2020)

"the goal of chemistry,"
she said, smashing
the head of a cigarette
against the ashtray,
"is to turn everything
into everything else."

"of course,"
she said, pulling
herself off the chair
slowly, coughing,
"we haven't quite
gotten there yet."

6. crows

I should be listening to the teacher,
but I'm looking out the window
and seeing what the crows are up to,
like the way they waddle-hop
across the grass with their tail feathers
swishing side to side, or
how they crane their heads and twist their necks
to look for food crawling in the grass
or maybe watch someone walking by
or find a branch to perch on, or
the way they bob their bodies up and down
while they caw at each other
or at the cars driving by
or the squirrels dashing through the grass
looking for buried nuts, or
how they spread their wings
and fly somewhere else,
swooping out of my line of sight.

7. sometimes I hear the bell ringing

but I don't even know if it is a bell.
I swear I can see ropes coming down from the dome,
and it sure looks like they're holding something up,
but they could just be for decoration or support
(and this is the tallest building on campus,
so either reason is a pretty reasonable one),
and that bell always rings the same notes
and has the same tone, snow rain sun or hail (in that order),
but I don't entirely know how bells work
or if you can hit a bell consistently
or if you can adjust the notes that a bell makes
or what all you can do with a bell,
plus that'd be a pretty impressive sound
bouncing off all the neighboring buildings
and slipping between the trees
and sliding over the roofs and ducking under canopies
and ringing over my head while I walk to class,
all coming from a speaker system in a building
full of cramped hallways and stairwells,
one of which can probably take me up to the dome
so I can see the (possible lack of a) bell for myself,
but honestly I think it's more fun to wonder about it,
and I'm pretty sure campus security
would tackle me to the ground if I tried,
because it'd be a little weird if random students
could wander up to (what could be) a very expensive bell
just to see if it's actually there.

8. chemists hate water

I'm pretty sure every chemist
has a phase where they hate water,
and what's doing it for me
is all the residue water leaves behind,
and I know a lot of that
is just salts (and maybe some soap,
depending on what I was doing),
but I don't appreciate watching
a white crust grow on my test tubes
or cleaning glasses that will never
get any less foggy on the inside
or spraying my beakers with acetone
and wiping them down before starting any reaction
because I'd rather be safe than sorry,
but I hate how many times I have to worry
about being sorry, especially when water
dissolves half the things it touches
(and the rest too, depending on what
you put in it) and gives up half of everything
so it can float in the air
and get pulled into a vent
and get thrown out of the lab
that I'll be spending the next few hours in
cleaning up after it.

9. what I can grow

it's not fair
to ignore so much of the english language
because it's a little too fancy for me.

1. those words didn't deserve it -
they still have a specific meaning
and I can still use them for specific reasons
in specific contexts in front of specific audiences,
because that's the whole point of words,
and even if a word falls out of use
we can always give it another meaning
because language is all about
saying different things in the same way;
2. I'll throw out words like
2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazine
and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy
and dipicolinic acid-actinide complex
on a regular basis, albeit
around people who know what they mean
and care that I'm bringing them up;
3. I've read works from a few authors
who can walk that line
between graceful and direct,
pack metaphors into their sentences
and bust out the thesaurus
so you can understand them a little more
while they tell you about the time
they walked down to the store
or drove back from the office
or lost a close friend
they hadn't talked to in years.

it's just that I used to write
thinking I'd mastered the english language
when I'd just barely begun
to figure it out, so now
I open up some word document
from ten years ago
and I get a little more pissed off
every time I see a "may yet"
or "literate" or an allusion
to a blood sport that I'm not sure
I knew was a blood sport?
and I want to go back in time
and tell my younger self
that I may yet smack them
upside the head
if they keep putting may yet
in sentences.

that's all to say
I kicked a lot of my vocabulary
to the curb because
I wanted to start off
learning how to write with a few words
instead of all of them.
and I'm getting there,
but I still confuse my idioms
and write very long sentences
and throw synonyms at the page
to see what sticks
and lose my train of thought
and sometimes forget
that words can look nice,
but it's better when they look nice
and they mean something.
right now, I'm pretty sure
if I start using those old words again,
I'd just be grabbing a trash bag,
dragging it back to the house,
and dumping rotten bananas
and coffee filters and plastic
all over the carpet,
and I'd be better off waiting
for the trash to turn into compost
so I can pour it on some soil
in the backyard, and see what I can grow.

Aww fox what a mood on that last one.