Young Writers Society

Thread name origin story that absolutely no one asked for-

"lost stones" because I'm on a weight loss journey and also binged some Secret Eaters and I still have no idea how anyone could think "14 stone 9" is an intuitive way to measure human weight (actually had to do the math to verify this random number is not a ridiculous thing for a human to weigh-for the non-Brits, this is 205 lbs/92 kg), but it sounds kinda poetic to say I've lost over 3 stones and have no intention to finding them again. (side note-will def cw/spoiler anything I end up writing on this topic)

"old address books" because I bought something online from Kohl's for the first time in a while since I saw an ad for a cute purse. Got the notice that it was delivered and only then do I realize I didn't check the shipping address and it got sent to the graduate dorm apartments I lived in my first year of grad school...almost a decade ago now. Thankfully, they were returned to sender, I discovered that there is a way to text Kohl's customer service and get a timely response, and it did get refunded back to my store credit card, even if I didn't notice it was resolved until the other day when I had a panic attack wondering if I'd accidentally messed up my credit score with a missed payment since I'd had issues accessing the website on my phone. So then this got me thinking about writing letters to people from my past but sending them to a very outdated address, and that might be a neat NaPo theme to explore, but also kinda cliche. And then I thought about my mom's index-card system for keeping track of addresses/phone #s in ye olden days before smartphones, which honestly merits a poem or two in itself. So yeah, lots of potential there

"spreadsheet weeds" because with how work has been lately, this poem has been too fitting. I'm somewhat hopeful things will get better, but I"m also not holding my breath.

a year lost, at home with nothing to write about (2021, not completed)
weathered, yes, but still standing (2020, completed but barely)
saturn is home, and all is well (2019, completed)
all the thoughts you wish weren't real (2018, not completed)
buried under the coffee table (2017, completed)
the (non) master of my own (sham) destiny (2016, completed)
often wandering, still quite lost (2015, not completed)
Niteowl's Nest (2014, not completed)
Niteowl's Nonsensical Nothingness (2013, probably not completed)
Nite's Poetry Dumpster (2008, not completed)

1. starting is the hardest part

it is so easy not to start,
to let the page stay blank,
unsullied by your inadequate fingers
on a too-slow keyboard.

to let words float away
idealized in their unseen potential,
another greatest film of all time
that was never made.

to lay in bed each morning
and never get up
because you never learned to walk
because you were so afraid of falling.

to never go out again
and wallow in your loneliness
because you won't be foolish enough again
to think that friendship (let alone love)
was something you were meant to have.

but something beyond your fears
compels you to get up with the sun,
to walk in spite of all the times you fall,
to find someone that makes you forget
all those who rejected you.

and you know you'll never write
a great poem,
maybe not even a good one,
but at least you have started.

2. on dunbar's number

the hong kong airport,
3 am.
arms weak
from lugging my bag around.
i am hanging by a thread
just one flight left
between me and home.

three hours to departure,
i settle in with my book
when i see a guy that looks like you
bags spread across a row of seats.

that's hardly unusual.
even now my brain tries
to find you everywhere
as if that is perfectly reasonable.

the man looks up
and it's not like all the not-quite-yous
i've seen before.
this delusion seems more solid,
but like dreams, you don't question delusions
until they have ended
and you feel ashamed you ever believed.

and the polite thing to do,
the safe thing,
perhaps the morally right thing,
would be to leave him alone
and let him catch his flight
unaware that he made a woman feel
like she'd gone insane just by sitting there.

but if i say nothing
and he walks away,
i'll never know if my meds just need adjusting
or if i'd missed a chance to have
whatever my mind wants
when it looks for you.

as i am paralyzed by the decision,
the man looks up.
He approaches,
probably to ask me to stop staring at him.
I avert my gaze and prepare to apologize

"Hey, Long time no see. How are you?"

i know that voice.
and my delusions don't have voices like that.
fuck.

Hey nite! Always happy to see your poetry around the site

I liked your introduction of where the title terms came from, it's always neat when little snippets have poetic and personal reading and then being able to get a window into their inspiration.

Poem 1 is very relatable - I always hold off on that "first" poem of NaPo until the last minute of April 1st if I can help it, so I definitely related to it, and thought it was a great way to begin the thread.

Poem 2 - I've never heard of that concept the poem's inspired by, but I agree it is really poetic. The final stanza was particularly hard-hitting and unexpected but a striking end.

3. Ian

I'd say the day I stepped on your glasses
was the beginning of the end,
but that implies that anything ever began
in the first place,
that I had ever belonged
the way I believed I had.

you were filming us doing the Thriller dance
for a YouTube video (I wonder if it's still online)
and you'd set them on the ground
for some godforsaken reason
and of course my stupid foot found them.

Did I ever say I was sorry?
I hope I did, but I can't remember,
only that I retreated in embarrassment.

I should have done more,
should have offered to pay for a replacement
(even as a "broke college student",
my parents would have given me the money,
even if there was an hour long lecture attached.)

I justified saying nothing
because you didn't wear them half the time anyway
so in my head it wasn't that big a deal.
embarrassment won over empathy
and I never spoke of it again.

but shame plays the long game
and here I am, fourteen years later
driving home from work, my foot on the gas
as I recall how I fell on the mud-brown carpet,
the way my heart dropped when I heard that crunch,

and I miss my turn and almost swerve into the wrong lane
while re-writing this apology over and over in my head
and I don't think it would have changed much
in the long run
if I'd sent you a check for the glasses,
but at least I wouldn't feel
like an amoral beast
pretending to be a decent human being.

omg Tae, those first two lines are such a mood, that just goes so beautifully into the next two and - just. Excellent imagery all around.

(also the last two lines. Thank you fellow person who obsesses over things that happened over a decade ago and everyone else has probably forgotten)

4. "What if it all goes right?"

My therapist asks me this
as I get distracted by the oddity
of my face on the potato-quality Zoom call
(my jawline looks weirdly like my grandma's
and I may be old but not that old).

And I wonder, not for the first time,
how she has the audacity to ask this,
as if I haven't told her a thousand tales
of how I was young and optimistic
and believed I would find
a calling
a friendship
a true love
only to find reality
does not reward the naïve.

I may not have been born a cynic,
but I wrap it around me like that too-big coat
I bought because I figured I could only get fatter
and no one wants the shame
of struggling with zippers in the cold.

My mother thinks I look silly
in that coat, but my therapist says
that perhaps I am an adult now
and I don't need to live
by her rules of what looks best.

And in these fragile early days
of spring, I should not need that coat
as I go to meet people again
wearing only metaphorical masks,
but if I let it go, I'll get frozen again
by the echoes of
"what are you doing here?"
"nobody wants to be with you."
"there's someone else"
"unfortunately you are not the right fit for our organization".

And so I sit here,
looking dowdy and over-heated,
cracking jokes about how my face
is 100 percent effective birth control,
because self-insults may not be
the best insurance policy,
but they're the only one I can afford.

the first entry refereencing the thread title

5. the index card address book

in the dark days before
smartphones carried along
all the names and numbers
we wouldn't bother to remember
(but now carry along
as little pixelated reminders
of who we used to be)

my mother had index cards
in a hunter-green metal box,
originally to catalog her wedding guest list
and then every holiday season
it would come out, a handwritten record
of relatives and family friends
to wish well and thank for gifts.

over the years,
they'd be amended,
old addresses crossed out
when people moved up into mansions
(or back down into shacks).

Some moved so much
they had cards stapled together,
like my uncle after he got divorced
(and my aunt got her own card),
while others stayed steady--
my family is hardly the nomadic sort.

Some cards were used often,
to the point I hardly had to look
to know the address (though I always did,
just in case)
while others sat unused at the back--
perhaps they bought my mom
a lovely serving dish,
but we haven't seen them much
this side of the millenium.

and in these more blue-lit days,
names on a screen
are more convenient, to be sure,
but I can't say I remember addresses
like I did when I copied them by hand
from a card written before I was ever born.

6. to my soulmate

i haven't met you yet
(at least as far as i know)
and yet i'm terrified of you.

of the morning
when i wake up in your bed
for the first time. you're still asleep
and i try to calculate my ability
to leave quietly, before i have to see
the regret on your face.
but before i can get up, you awaken
and now you want me to stay for breakfast
and i assume you're just being polite
but i stay anyway,
assuming this is the last time i will see you.

soon, i am proven wrong.
you keep calling me, texting me,
asking me to take up space
in your precious weekends
and you laugh at my jokes
and you swear it's because i'm actually funny
and i try to believe you
(and my therapist says i should believe you).

i share my secrets too soon
and instead of running,
you share your own, so we're even.
one day, i wake up in your bed
and it feels like my bed, our bed,
and I worry i'm taking up too much space
even though you say it's fine.

and as i memorize all your stories
you morph from this rose-colored haze
into a real human--flawed, but generally good
and i start saying "we" out loud
and you don't correct me
and you start saying it too.

and my world becomes our world.
not much different on the outside.
there's still boring tuesdays
and stress-inducing thursdays
and too-short saturdays
i waste on doom -scrolling bad news
instead of doing the things
that make life better for me us.

but there's a shift.
we've built up such a library
of inside jokes that in a crowded room,
i can hear you say one word
and i'll be holding back laughter
and when i read about something fun
i want to do, i know i have someone
i can at least try to talk into going with me,
and we have our bad days,
but it's not as bad as i feared
on the day i wrote this letter.

and now there's a ring
on my finger. i fidget
with it constantly,
but it feels strangely right on my hand
and i lose my mind when the reality
of planning a wedding
shatters my Pinterest-fueled fantasties
but that's okay
because you're the most important part
and the rest is just details
(i say as if i am not the sort of person
who lives and dies by the details).

and by now you've said you loved me
too many times to count
and most of the time i believe it.
Fears and doubts come calling
and like a fool i open the door
but when they see what we've built,
they don't stick around long.

in conclusion,
even though i'm scared of you
i desperately want to meet you
so i'm not building alone.

and now for the exact opposite poem in terms of tone and length...

7. An Observation on Soulmates

"The One" is Santa
Clause for the patriarchy.
You can't change my mind.

8. corey

the night before my best friend's wedding,
we were doing last minute manicures
and drinking in her mom's hotel room.
a fellow bridesmaid used a shade called
"first kiss", a pale blush pink
in the world of nail polish marketing.

i said my first kiss was puke green
and i'd recount the story
in all of its dumb and naive glory,
but no one cares
and though we only met once,
i know you'd like that too much,
so i will not elaborate.

Taking this prompt from Poem a Week club/@Carina

if anyone's struggling with a napo poem, i randomly challenge u to write a poem based on the words "kiss me like the sun" / "sunkissed"

9. i am pale for a reason

we love the sun
and yet it kills us,
we want kisses
and yet they burn us.

i used SPF 70 sunscreen that summer,
but of course, i'd burn anyway
because i never had the foresight
to re-apply often,
or maybe i just wanted my outside
to feel like my insides when i thought of you.

like sunshine, kisses
look nice on the TV screen.
i watch alone as the feisty heroine
tames the handsome rogue
and i sigh as i remember
when i fancied myself the main character
who would get that earth-shattering kiss.

but that summer,
as i kissed so many not-you's in dark sweaty nightclubs
my physiology drawing me in
to anyone who would have me,
(if only for a moment, if only until they're sober)
my higher mind burned with rage
--this is dirty, disloyal, wrong.

i haven't needed sunscreen in years
because i've chosen to remain inside
so as not to absorb the rays, the pain.
likewise, i haven't kissed
because i'm still that fool who wants
more than she deserves
so i'm better off leaving
the kisses and sunshine on movie sets.

but maybe i can't stay unburnt forever.
maybe it's time to buy
sunscreen and lipstick again.

11. yet another unnecessary epilogue

i'd love to have that happy day
when i remember you again
and i realize it's been days
--or weeks, months, years even--
since you have been here
in that empty chair my subconscious
keeps reserved for you.

but even now, even though
in this dark timeline
we would have never lasted
even if we had started in the first place,
my mind listens to music,
songs of longing and heartache
and ties them all to you.

and i suppose i could stop listening to music,
(but i would rather not,
and i suppose i could tie them all to someone new
(but i've tried that, it doesn't work)

and so i remember day after day,
to love you still, though in a different way.

uh I guess I skipped 10...guess "counting" has also gone out the window with the rest of my brain.

10. gadabout

in my dreams, i am the sort of person
who can fly to anywhere on a whim
and see the world, no itinerary necessary.

but here in reality,
i am the sort anchored to home,
both literally by excess adipose tissue
and figuratively by the fear
of losing my mind in a foreign country again
(0/10, do not recommend)
and even closer to home, i struggle
with determining what i can do for myself.

and if i dared to do it,
to take that last minute flight to japan,
i'd probably be lost in indecision
in the hotel room all day
and only realize what I should have done
once I get back home
(assuming I do, indeed, make it back home).

my mom never saw the allure of traveling,
and, in at least that one respect,
i wish i could have been more like her.

okay here comes the weight loss poem I guess (cw-weight/dieting/body image)

12. on losing stones