Young Writers Society

I always did suck at titles, hehe.
So I'm a bit late, if you'll excuse me. I did write a poem yesterday, and I suppose I'll write today's now. But first:

April 6th (I'll admit, I do have a soft spot for this one)~

The headlights in your eyes guide me out
Of the tunnels I’ve dug myself into,
Among bats and worms and other things
That live in the dirt of wishes that crumbled
Before they had a chance to take a breath.
I am an old ragdoll, a rough stitching of
Muscle, curve, and woman parts, held together
By ivy-twined threads of pain and love –
And yes, sometimes, I love the pain
Of loving until it is too painful to exhale
Because the air tastes so sweetly (bitterly!)
Of your skin and your tongue and you.
I have dust inside my cracked spaces,
In the grooves of my fingernails and in
The lines of my face, settled onto me
When I stopped to stare at everything that
Makes the taste of you something I crave:
The folds of your eyelids and the feel
Of how your arms are now woven into
My fabric fingertips, frayed from holding on
Always too tight to things that made me unravel.
And this shovel that was my only road
Away from hurt and loss, but mostly guilt
With sharp black claws and pointed teeth,
Is now dissolved into the grime of me,
Along with the bats and worms and other things
That tore into my ragdoll heart, made me
Damaged and weathered and worn out.
But even these disintegrated parts look new,
Look shiny and golden and brilliant.
Because now I know that well-kept secret:
I am beautiful because I love someone
Who loves me for all my broken pieces.

April 7th (here goes...)~

She sits across from me and stares,
Watching things not in my world.
I eat with my mouth and want more;
She eats with her mind, wanting less
Of what this world has offered her,
Things that taste sickeningly sweet or
Otherwise soggy and over-salted
From the tears I’d never seen her shed.
I reach out to touch her shoulder,
Afraid she will crumble under my touch
And I will have to trade my soul’s sister
For a handful of bittersweet remorse.
I ask her words I do not think about,
Because my lips shape them in my sleep:
“Are you okay? Please eat something.”
She smiles and shakes her head,
Recites her part of this overplayed script:
“I’m fine. No thanks, I’m not hungry.”
I swallow the raw lump in my throat;
Her satiety makes my stomach angry,
So I do the only thing I know how:
Cross my fingers and take a bite
Of this mystery meat labeled Life.

April 8th (I know I'm in good hands =] )~

Our hands tell stories to each other
When they slip casually together,
A movement as familiar as dreaming.
Your hand dwarfs mine as our fingers
Grip each others’ tightly, grasping
Desperately for the piece of ourselves
We left with the other the last time
That our hands were forced to part.
I like how your hands are warm
Against my perpetually cold skin –
Branding me with your lingering touch:
I am yours, I am yours, I am yours.
And this juxtaposition of opposites
Reminds me of how my palms
Have permanent imprints of yours.
When we lie together but don’t speak,
Our fingertips move to tell each other,
“I am here. And when I am gone,
I will leave myself in your hands.”

April 9th (this is reallyreally bad -.-) ~

I want to shoot the weatherman
For stealing my sunny days,
For promising rain and thunder
And letting the temperature drop.
It is April! I want to scream.
It is spring and the birds are chirping,
The squirrels are making the yard
Look like a pockmarked warzone.
But the sky looks angry and grey
And the air bites into my skin.
I want to shed these layers,
Trash that marshmallow jacket
And let the sun kiss my face.
But I shiver and tug my zipper up
And colorfully curse Long Island.

April 10th ~

I feel naked when you touch me,
Undress me with your halo eyes.
Forgive me if I run and leave you
With a handful of muddy scales
And a mouthful of saltwater tears,
While I slither away in slime trails;
I can’t crawl out of my skin
And burst my lungs breathing in
The thick charcoal air between us.
I bleed out black and metal dust,
But I only taste your golden light.
I’ll try not to let your Eden skin
Dissolve in my thorn-bush claws –
If I carved these rivers into my skin,
Styx might drown us when our teeth fuse,
When I attach you to the empty space
Inside my incinerated flesh;
Lord knows I drowned long ago,
Fell to the land of the damned
When I fell in love with you.


April 11th ~

I kick up the dust in my half-there heart,
Between the realms of who I am
And who I desperately need to be;
For desperation and the fear of bones
Is what makes me shake in dreaming.
Sleeping in a rain of cosmic stardust,
Caught in my own continental drift:
I am only the beginning of a lifetime
Of reinventing internal gravity.
The flow of fingertips and the permafrost
Packed hard into my cratered spine
Reminds me that I will forget
The things I swore I would remember,
The things Time paints a hazy grey.
My brain is the hazardous black space
Of dark matter energy, shone through eyes
That water with chemical secrets;
If I could be that long-awaited miracle
I might learn to be alive.


April 12th ~

I’ve fallen in love with fragile things:
The eyelash-wishes you steal from me,
The brush of your hand on my cheek.
I’ve fallen in love with waiting for you,
With the century-long minutes spent
Lingering on your last songbird word,
Desperately hoping I might catch another.
But I’m left with only handfuls of feathers
And eyes full of “I miss you, darling,”
Even though we stand close enough
For me to feel the heat of your skin.
I’ve fallen in love with the hungry space
Feeding on silence and frantic thoughts,
Starving for the feel of our tangled fingers.
I’ve fallen in love with sleepless nights,
Thinking of how I’d be dreaming of you
If only I could somehow stop thinking.
I’ve fallen in love with holding together
The things I know are falling apart

April 13th ~

Daddy, I’m so sorry that I’m far too much like you.
We consume to the things we think we want,
And boil in white-hot rage when they slip away.
Fire is not a thing to be handled immaturely,
And we both know we were never taught the rules.
There isn’t enough oxygen in this tiny house
To keep us both alive to see our aftermath;
I, the smaller flame by far, extinguish first,
Drowned by saltwater and a lack of that heat:
The one thing I wish you would have given me.
Daddy, I know the neighborhood only burns down
When we try to fight each other’s fires with our own,
But I can’t stand letting you believe that I may never
Burn brightly enough for you to finally see me.

April 14th ~

He smells like piss and bananas,
I think, and I have to wonder if
The UN had thought of that,
Of the rats he has to sleep with
And the TB he’ll get next month.
I wonder if this boy I don’t know
Who lives in my television screen,
Covered in dirt and fly bites…
I wonder if he ever slept in a bed
Or had a fabric-softened shirt to wear.
I wonder how I would survive
If I had to smell like piss and bananas.

April 15th (I did not want to, nor did I have the time to, write a legitimate poem that day. So yay for haikus.)~

I really do not
Want to write a poem to-
Day. Please don’t make me.



April 16th ~

I was a flimsy paper girl,
Ripped and torn from time,
Soft from being folded up
And unfolded and refolded
More than I’d like to count.
I was floating in a sea
Of every sharp halo knife
That ever pierced my skin;
And I was disintegrating,
Turned to saltwatery ashes.
But the ocean spit me out,
And look where I landed:
Crumpled up at your feet.
I don’t mind being rebuilt
By your crazy-glue fingers.


April 17th (Because I am soso tired of everything)~

NaPo should be over
Because writing a poem
Every single day for a month
Is a lot of work.
And my poetry sucks anyway.
This isn't a poem.
It's just words arranged
In unrhythmic, mixed up lines.
And if it's April anyway,
Shouldn't it at least be warm?

April 18th (I'm so sorry these last few poems have been so terrible. I've been having a bad couple of days, so not exactly in the mood to write =/ ) ~

I don’t remember when everything
Began to go wrong, to fall apart like
An old building left abandoned long ago.
But everything in my head is screaming
For me to find something long and sharp
And carve more broken promises into
My jagged flesh, now pinched up in
Frozen bloodstained mountain ranges.
No, I don’t remember much past
This hazy black fog crawling in my brain
And stealing the things that made me.
Now I am a cold metallic robot,
Rusted with inch-thick misgivings.

April 19th ~

My calf muscles strain against my papery skin,
Threatening to break through the fragile elastic.
If I run faster, maybe I’ll be able to fly and finally,
Finally, leave behind all the things that reach
Out for me with their long, knobbed fingers.
Maybe if my rubber band legs won’t stretch further
And my latex balloon lungs shrivel for want of air,
Maybe I’ll finally be happy under these layers
Of skin and bone and muscle, but always fat.
My hands sucker-punch the space in front of me
And I wish it would get the hell out of my way,
Just let me run until I am all ropes and skeleton.