Young Writers Society

I'll probably add some other NaPos to this, eventually...

#3: To the park I once called home...

I had stood here some years before, when the grass (and the wind)
propelled me forward to the small solar system: the adolescent jungle
gym, a sandbox and the whirr of old water fountains, and a boy
I once knew. I would watch as his father stood thoughtfully to the side, perhaps struck
that the world is less solid than we think--or worried, a head full of words
no father should endure.

This time it is I who is standing there, being watched, buttoned
against the wind, alone, my hands in my jacket pockets, a ball
of Kleenex closed in one fist. And as I watch two boys run circles,
laugh mercilessly and oblivious to the pain of others, I thought
I saw a pinpoint of light from the woods--like the glint in his eyes,
like a star I might see in broad daylight, if only
I had thought to look up


#7: If you were made of construction paper...

...we would not be spun from one nowhere to the next,
or have the argument in my head where you get up,
touch the bed and tell me you should have left. In fact, I would like
very much to revise the rules of flight--that I might rise
on the wings of wit or intellect and touch the time
and space as measured by the heart. It's true--
I would scratch my name in longhand
against the rough-edged paper of your body; glue
my emotions as they are: dumb and thin
from a substance I don't remember.

Some nights, I imagine this is all we are. You, lying there
and breathing--your heart, I hear it knock
from rooms away and count the stars with its bony knuckle--
an absurd sound against the darkness. Even still,
I stop in place to listen--go to sit and take your warm hand
which it seems has held nearly everything once and squeeze it shyly,
politely, as though we are strangers and watch the shadows
from the window climb and fall--the fear that you will leave
easing like the words "I need you" across my heart.

#9: The trouble with loss is...

1.

I place gyroscopes within the first order
of wonders: small worlds which coalesce,
bend and break with the lean and sway
of tipping fingers, the last to balance
so lightly between our hands.

2.

Eventually, we stop missing those things
we misplace; either because they have been gone
for so long or because we ourselves
are disappearing.

3.

This evening I sat with a book at the window, reading
until the sun went down, reading until the book and I
became another part of the darkness. I did not move
to switch the light--simply remembered my idle fascination
with a gyroscope I'd made in grade school--simply watched
as the pale gray ghost of my hand turned the page.

Your NaPo's make me wish I never attempted NaPo, as my attempts merely shame me. ^^

Awesome.

*Hearts* Le Penguin.

I liked Poem #7 the best, but I have a question. What are the 1 and 2 and 3 for on Poem #9? *if its obvious I will surly feel stupid* Sorry if its a sucky review, I'll try to give a better one when I can.

Do you've an explanation for the ellipsis in the titles? If not, I'd say cut them--they're bothering me, anyway :p.

Really, though, for NaPos, these are outstanding.

#11: Help for the herring-impaired...

You heard me right,
you’re glossy-scaled and finless,
sailing up the nostril of a creek.

I can help with this predicament.
My hands have cast and mastered
many shallows. My mind has pictured

you and I like this. Together
we will net a mint of fishes,
fill our boat to bow with kipper

for the smokehouse.
And, afterwards, once back on shore,
we’ll share a frosty pint of cinnamon lager,

crisp bread, salted kisses, and a calm
that comes like breathlessness on deck.

April 3: This is very well written. I usually dislike poems that read as prose but this one has enough beauty in description, little details and the simplicity of your words that it works. I have two very small suggestions. Rather than 'watched' I think observed might fit better (Stanza two, line one) and I think a semi colon might be more appropriate than the comma on your second to last line.

I'm curious as to why you've not placed a full stop at the end? I think it gives the poem a good sense of still being open but I was wondering if it was intentional or not?

April 7:

I would scratch my name in long-hand

This one flows very well and there's something so highly poetic about it. I seriously don't know how you write like this but it's lovely. The emotions are clear, the words touching and I refuse to apologise for my lack of criticism because it surely deserves none.

April 9: I didn't like this as well as the others, partly due to the structure and partly because of the content. I think that maybe you should start each stanza with One. or Two. or Three. and then the first line of it on the next line? I think that would be less distracting. As for what it's about, I felt that your arguement could be stronger. That said, i do like how you returned to 'gyroscope' in the last stanza which pulled it together nicely and it's a thought provoking poem. You've took a very unique view on what's bad about loss which is great, very original.

April 11: The end of this is truly beautiful and though it's not my favourite, I still think it well written. The flow of this one isn't quite as smooth and lovely as the others but the change in structure is refreshing. I think the imagery could have been stronger and the emotion wasn't quite so edident but it's good.

#15: Nothing Short of a Climax...


Your back, as you leaned over metrics forming bonds
with scarcity, was broad and strong; your leg
was pressing into mine, while all around the college seemed too temporal to beg

the question any longer. Tenting out
my jeans as you touched me—identity,
this act of definition—you made me

want to be a witness once again to the enormity
of yearning and of disbelief, my surging
rock-hard cock propelled me to your bedroom. In med school,

we begin the study of life with our hands buried in the dead,
so one must wonder: should we start with love as whole
or torn asunder? The end result: a foregone conclusion—loss, the only language

we have yet to master. There are no cures, no pills to make poems easier
to read, pictures easier to see or music easier to hear; people
will always be harder to love than it seems, but whether from brute need

or divine energy, we do: a third gate through which we dream
between the flesh, what cannot help but fail, come bone,
come shine, and the heart, turned soft and blue

with the eventual knowledge that the poems and pictures,
people and places we hold onto so tightly are foolish and sad:
we begin our study of life with the dead because everything has already left us.

#16: A Landscape of Human Figure...

............I now know why for a week
I have not slept more than half the night,
awake with the small moon
.........................................& with every
bird-cry,
.............every shed of light:
.........................................I have
this burden on me which will not let me sleep

I have the sweet
pain, the douce douleur the troubadours
speak of
...............Ease me
............................I am bruised with
the weight of the burden
....................................Here where they sang,
the lourd fardeau is upon me
..........................................Like them, I come to you
saying: you have given me this burden
.........................................................Lift it
with your touch.

#17: Angel, Interrupted...

In sleep, I'm always calling you
my friend, even as you rope me in,
unwind me. I let you bind me
to the bed where we play pretend
that this is meaningless—meaning
is overrated anyway—meaning it isn't
until I wake up, mind
reduced to hurry and flesh
reduced and wrecked
that I am hugging my body to me
as if to shield it from
the pains that will go through me,
as if hands were enough
to hold off an avalanche.

#18: The River Gods...

I can say it now,
what his hands mean;
a shamefaced pleasure.
I am small;
he is in charge
of me,
and his peacock name
is the name of a sumptuous
gondolier's church
of his birth:

by some justice,
balanced, inspiriting,
now life has given me
a Venetian man.

What was it like
to grow up in Venice?

Always the feeling of water
and protective stone—

If I'm unchecked rain, a gale
on his family balcony,
it's because
his joie de vivre fingers,
the glass-green canals,
the filigree
and gold-leaf luxury
release me;

it's because
suddenly I hear
my father recalling,
after long, amnesiaed silence,
a knife across his throat,
baleful hands hauling him
into a bedroom—
till we breathe together,
boys of the same age,
father and son,
beleaguered,
mirrored in our wounding;

it's because
I have a choice
to emerge from this maze
unalarmed,
unmolested,
my garnered power to select
intact—
to love this time
with all my being.

In response to #18--

It is more sentimental, more near, so to speak, than seems common of your poetry, Brad. In that, I like and dislike it. It rambles more, draws its threads less neatly together.

Somehow the middle bit--if not the entirety, of S1, seem superfluous.

Begin on your italics, perhaps? Doubtless, that changes the intro's perspective; but it also seems more direct






IMP

15. - Nothing Short of a Climax...

Is sad and touching and... Explicit. ^^

“we begin our study of life with the dead because everything has already left us.”

I thought that was beautiful, still sad, overwhelmingly so, really. But that might just be me. ^^ Sounds odd too, considering the open nature of the rest of the poem. Clear sexuality and whatnot. I still find it to be the kind of sad that has such a depth as that cannot be ignored.

16. - A Landscape of Human Figure...

I thought I read this first without the dotted lines. I preferred it that way, although that may have been my imagination. I can’t such much in terms of how it touched me, ahah. I think it’s sweet and sad once again but slips past me, so quickly, and I feel as though I miss something important in the reading. A fantastic touch, if it is on purpose.

17. - Angel, interrupted...

Again I feel as though I miss something. But here it works so well, this half-knowledge of something both troubling and crushing. I [particularly like the last two lines;

“as if hands were enough
to hold off an avalanche.”

I’m not sure why. – I’m so crazy. ^^ But I really do like them. They’re so solid, with the image. It’s lovely.

18. - The River Gods...

Here I feel like I want to agree with Imp, and have you take away that whole first section. But I think that is merely because I love the italics so much. It’s odd, also, because I see that stanza, and I like it but feel it disconnect from the rest, because of the italics that come after and the feeling there. Seems hardly fair, for the words and meaning are they, they just don’t feel right, for some reason.

But you’d know that better than I. ^^

I’d hate to try to read anything you’ve written here while too sad, it may just end me. Haha. They’re all just so touching and full of meaning and sadness. Lovely work, dear. I think I like Angel, Interrupted and Landscape of a Human Figure best.

*Hearts* Le Penguin.

#19: Shave...


My beard is a creation of silent labor
like ocean steam rising to form clouds
or the bloom of spiderwebs each morning;
the mystery of how whiskers grow,
like the drink roses take from the vase,
or the fall of fresh rain, becoming
a river, and then rain again, so silently.
I think of all these slow and silent forces
and how quietly my own life is passing by.

I think of those mornings, when I am shaving,
and try to imagine my father in a masquerade of foam, then,
as if it was his beard I took the blade to,
the memory of him in tiny snips of black whiskers
swirling in the drain—dead pieces of the self
from the face that never taught me how to shave.
His legacy of whiskers like black seeds
sown over my cheek and chin, my flesh
a testament to his.

I think of the mornings with heavy stubble
and the blade in my hand, when my eyes
don't recognize themselves in a mirror echoed
with a hundred faces I have washed
and shaved—it is in that split second,
when perhaps the roses drink and clouds form,
when perhaps the spider spins and rain transforms
that I most understand the invisibility of life
and the intensity of vanishing, like steam
at the slick edges of the mirror, without a trace.

#20: The Interruption, for Jack...

This morning while learning Diabelli
I watched the sun break
against the window
and look! How your shadow
links with mine—as it did,
I felt your voice, lulling,
uneasy and unsure
of this world, pass
through my very being
so that I had to excuse myself
from the piano room:

crazy troubadour, you think
someone will not feel your love
in heaven! It happens, love
looms again in your lifetime,
and how it beats, your heart
that was once directionless.

From the lavatory, I watched
slanted light on a terrace
like the light
on the ermine and pearls
of Vermeer's women—
as a towhee
reaches the sill—

Rampant tears:
to be so human,
to be so graced
with the rose-holding hope
of the unperturbed
fool in the tarot,
as he steps off a promontory;
perhaps this serene, upreaching
precinct of showy stars
will be your net:

here goes, here goes.