Young Writers Society

The treehouse is pine wood pushed against
itself like the tree

...

Below this, trunk split and brushing down
to the turmoil soil, my feet are moving
again.

Her skirt is static, a brief cling of fabric that keeps
everything motionless, paused on the edge of seat
and action. Everything takes two steps longer when you forget
about speed, the break between her thighs
and plastic, the turn of her head to the side,
the breakdown of language into sign.

Peng, where does the white willow grow?
Do you know what I speak of? Is she waiting there, sitting in branches above, perhaps the agreement you made years ago, but can never remember, itching at your neck, nibbling your mind like something happily going numb as it falls out of sight once again; is poetry a form of rehab for those unable to function in society?
The willow Peng, the leaves are made of dresses worn when you were seven and eight, and fourteen; oh are these memories not yours? Or is time fading and ebbing and erasing and rewriting the answer to the exams we all guessed on?
Do you remember the willow Peng, or has it been too long too long, too long for hands to reach back past the shore and smile at the young girl and boy's skin, porcelain smooth and silky euphoria; where did the days go, or has the willow left?
Everything glimmers and is illuminated in times of writing; Foer wrote a novel on lies and finding yourself and used every literary trick in the book, knock on wood pun intended, but where is the depth when we're forty and fifty? Peng our eyes are losing the color of life if we write about the past.
I heard you were going and you were staying, and I saw your play on words about showers in summer and the creation of space in a table speckled with rain and salt forming rings; is that your heart losing its beats as you ponder the future and think "My past, my past...I have no past...just a wandering soul in a war with a world that offers me hostility in a glare".
Peng I, I ping things to you, but you're slick, untouchable, clever and crafty, long past the white willow's grasp
but I feel you're calling eternally for the hand that tears and rips; but what is a hand that only destroys
everything it never values? I think sometimes I see God as love and God as nothing, and God as a constant flux
with the cycle "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" and Peng it's a thing
we have to avoid; what are you Peng?
Speaker of words in metaphors and lines, Peng, or a conduit of change and chaos in a world that's a changin at our expense?