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rokutouxei · 4 years ago

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the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

ikemen vampire: temptation through the dark theo van gogh / mc | T | [ ao3 link in bio ]

The challenge seemed pretty simple: to try to befriend the university bookshop’s most sour employee, Theo van Gogh. As a literature major with a boatload of book recommendations on her back, it ought to be a simple task indeed. But as she uncovers what lies between Theo’s pages, the more she finds it harder to become closer to him without having to put the feeling directly into words. What can she learn from Theo about what it means to stay—and how can she teach Theo about what it means to let go? | written for ikevamp big bang 2020!

[ masterpost for all chapters ]

CHAPTER 10 OF 22

There are so many roots to the tree of anger that sometimes the branches shatter before they bear. - "Who Said it was Simple", Audre Lorde

Theo has never been to the physics building.

He’s been around the vicinities of the College of Science complex in the past, to endorse his organizations’ events or taking one of the basic science classes required to all the students in the university (he took chemistry), but aside from that, he hasn’t had much reason to be here in the past.

Until today.

He’s just gotten out of his class when he receives her message.

[ 2:20 | lit girl ] can we meet outside the physics bldg quad instead?

[ 2:22 ] sure

Theo had found a kind of rhythm with their little book exchange. It would take a lot of pressing and insisting to get him to admit to it, but in reality, Theo’s long gotten used to and even enjoys their little exchange of books and small discussions about it. Arthur had argued much earlier on that if Theo didn’t enjoy it he would insist to do it online, in a boring forum format with word count limits and sent through email, and that it is only because he enjoys her company so much that he is fine with it.

“Why here?” is the first thing he asks when he arrives and she is there waiting, but with a finger to her lips and a conspiratorial grin, she ushers him into the building, headed toward the elevator.

As she scans her ID through the gates, she says, “I have a thing to show you.”

When she clicks on the “rooftop” button, he’s surprised but doesn’t make a fuss.

If they get caught, at least they’ll both get caught.

Man, what kind of bad influence is this girl in his life?

The moment she unlocks the rooftop door with her keys and the sight below rolls into view, Theo understands why exactly she wanted to be up here.

They’re drawn, instantly, toward the edge, taking in the view over the barrier to see the town below. She had been babbling about a “new view” and “getting permission” when she visited last time at the bookshop, and it truly delivered. Seeing the lines of houses as little dots of light—Theo can understand why she’s so drawn to this place. It’s just right for someone who is always craving to go away: to see the place you come from seem so small, for the world to seem so big.

Theo leans against the concrete fence, wind tousling his hair. “Why do you have keys to the roof?”

“Astro club privileges,” she answers, twirling the keychain on a finger. “…Well, more like friendship privileges, really.”

“It’s beautiful,” Theo offers.

“I go up here often,” she admits, leaning her elbows over the concrete and resting her chin over her palms. She seems jittery, like her hands can’t sit still. She chews her lower lip in between each word. “This place is great for being alone.”

Theo crosses his arms over his chest. “Then why did you bring me here?”

“I…” a short breath, like weighing something, “I don’t mind being alone with you.”

She looks back at him with an expression he would describe as “hopeful”; he nods and closes his eyes for a moment, catches the barest upturn of a smile on her lips before he surrenders his eyes to the darkness.

“I don’t mind being alone with you either,” Theo says with his eyes closed, as if it would make it easier to say.

She chuckles. “That’s great to hear.”

For a few moments, the two of them rest in each other’s silences. It’s one of the few things they’ve learned to do with each other since starting the book club; to understand that not all things have to be said, to be comfortable in each other’s presence despite wordlessness. It feels like the breath between a book’s one chapter to the next. Like getting ready for what’s about to be said next.

“The Mary Oliver poetry book you lent me had parts highlighted,” Theo says after a tranquil moment. “It was interesting to find out what cheesy lines resonated with you,” he says, teasing in his tone.

She snorts, a little dishonest sound, looking down at the town below. “Really now? What did you find?”

Theo could pull out her book, could open it to the familiar marker flag he puts to mark the places he would like to talk about during the discussions, and read out the lines. But instead, he turns his head up to the autumn night sky, opening his eyes to look at the stars, and recites—

“I wanted / the past to go away, I wanted / to leave it, like another country; … I wanted to know, / whoever I was, I was / alive / for a little while.”

She turns to him with surprise in her eyes, and he turns to her carefully.

“Dogfish,” she says, recognizing the poem. It takes her everything to react with that at all.

They look at each other for a full, quiet moment, trying to look for answers in each other’s gaze, attempting to tear out the things that are hiding. Theo knows that she isn’t as good at him at hiding things she doesn’t want to be seen. She turns away before he can truly slice her open and look at the filleted halves of her heart.

Theo feels a pang at being spurned.

“It’s a good part, isn’t it?”

He is quiet for a moment. There are so many things he can ask at this point, but none of them feel real enough to be grasped, all heavy in his mind with the itch of curiosity. He doesn’t need to know if she doesn’t want to share, and he knows she would if it was so easy to do.

If she wanted him to know, too.

Instead, she buys time for just a little while. Turns to go to a nearby bench and table, bypassing the seat for the tabletop. Theo follows her, but does not come too close. Instead, he watches, as she folds her knees up and winds her arms around them, looking at the flicker of their small university town below.

Finally, she says: “Would you even care if I told you?”

“Of course,” jumps out of Theo’s mouth in a heartbeat.

She takes a moment as if to compose her thoughts before she begins to speak. “Remember when you asked me about why I was so eager to go away?” When he nods, she continues. “I just, I’ve always wanted to go someplace else,” she says. “I know you moved in here, but I... I grew up in this place. Not exactly in this city, no, but the one right over, and it's all I've known. Much of my memories of it are so foggy and blurred because it’s all mixed up. I've never been out there. And somehow I worry that I'll just... end up dying here, too. I don't want to die out here.”

"You're not going to die any time soon."

"Then why does it feel like it?" she snipes back, then sighs. "I'm sorry. That wasn't..."

Theo shakes his head. "It's okay."

"It's not. I just... I get too invested when it comes to opportunities to go away because I keep thinking it would allow me to, you know.” She makes a vague hand gesture that doesn’t make much sense and sighs, again. “I’ve looked forward to entering this university for the longest time because I thought it would be enough a going-away to… satisfy whatever this is inside of me itching to come out.”

He closes his eyes once more, tilting his head up to the autumn sky. Opens them to watch his breath turn into small wisps of cold fog.

“I thought being away from my family… away from who I was, who they thought I was… I thought that would be enough. But it hasn’t been. I’m here, and… I don’t want it anymore. And I know three years—three years isn’t much to want to leave this place, but I’m done.”

Why? The question hangs in the air. Theo doesn’t give it a voice.

She groans, the defeated sound of it making Theo turn his gaze back to her. “I want to be someone else, and I don’t think I can become that someone while I’m still here. In the only place I’ve ever known.” She wrings her hand together and gets up on her feet, jumping off the table to lean on the concrete barrier, hand curling around it like it was the only thing keeping her together. “I feel like I’ll never… find a place that’ll keep me settled. How much farther do I have to go before it feels like home? Like safety? Is it out there, or is something wrong with me? I want to want to live a life that I’ll be proud of but I don’t know how to get there. All I have are anchors tying me down.”

Theo doesn’t know what to answer.

He wants to say I’m plenty proud of you already but it doesn’t feel like the right thing to say.

“I don’t want to be tied down. I don’t want—a boyfriend, nostalgia, a reason to say—I want to go, but at the same time—” She looks out at the town below and sighs. “I don’t know where I’m going. I know I love what I do, and I know I enjoy what I’m studying, but—this place is just making me claustrophobic now. I want to see what’s out there, and I feel like it’s the only thing that’ll allow me to enjoy the company of home,” she explains, and turning to him, she asks, “do you know how that feels, Theo?”

And the first instinct is to lie to give her the answer she wants to hear, but then the truth jumps out of him anyway.

And truth be told, he does not, but his heart aches in a way he doesn’t understand and he can only imagine what it is like to be in her shoes. He shrugs, and she laughs.

Her voice is softer now. “Is it silly? I’m sorry.”

“It’s not silly,” he says. “I was just thinking about how similar you were to Vincent.”

Fully aware of his little obsession with his older brother, she scrunches her nose in disapproval. “To Vincent?”

Refusing to meet her gaze, Theo looks down at the town below as well. “Broer is really talented. You know this. The College of Arts knows this. That’s why no matter how long he takes to finish his thesis, they won’t let him go. Because they know what he’s capable of—if he gets his mind into it.”

“Okay…?”

“You’re the same.”

“Pffffft,” she snorts, shaking her head. “No way, what? He’s a legend. I’m just a stuck-up Junior trying to get delayed by going on an exchange program.”

“…who is also working her ass off with extra credit and other requirements because you want to prove you’re better than what this place has made you to be, aren’t you?” Theo asks. For once, she is silent. She goes quiet when she knows she has lost the banter. “You want to leave and be something else but the being scares you, so you focus on the leaving. Broer is the same. The being scares him. So he focuses on the making, not knowing that everything he makes builds him as well.” Theo closes his eyes. “The leaving makes you.”

She narrows her eyes and sighs. “I—I don’t know where this is going, Theo.”

“What I’m saying is maybe—maybe,” Theo says, “Maybe you don’t really need to go away, just convince yourself that it’s not better out there, after all.”

Something… shatters.

She looks at him with such an offended expression on her face, he would have said sorry if his throat wasn’t already in knots. It wasn’t what he’d intended to do. He hadn’t meant to reverse what she believed in. He hadn’t meant to deny her his faith.

Just wanted to show her what it looked like from the other side, with his feet planted to the ground.

He isn’t forcing her to say.

He isn’t.

But it feels like it.

And for a moment he thinks she would get mad, shout back her most sarcastic maybe you’re right or the most disbelieving that makes sense, tucking away all the honesty her heart can provide, but instead she brandishes her words like a knife and says:

“You don’t know me that way, Theo. You don’t get to say that.”

And Theo doesn’t know if it’s a lie or the full truth.

She gets up on her feet and dusts off her pants. She’s about to head towards the door when she turns back to him, eyes already glassy.

“You know why I brought you up here?” she says, each syllable a sharp corner. “I wanted to tell you first that I got in. First round for the scholarship.”

“Why would you tell me first?”

“I don’t know!” she admits, frustration leaking in her voice. “I felt like I could tell you. No—I wanted to tell you. I felt like you’d get it. That I could trust you with this but apparently I can’t!” She picks up her bag, and without even turning to face Theo one more time marches away from him.

Theo calls out to her, half-hearted words about book exchange, staying out until the sun goes down, but it gets lost in the wind.

She brings him here to this one place she likes to be alone and then he does that to her.

But he can’t reach out when he’s pushing her away, and “I’ll see you soon, Theo,” is all she says as she makes her way to the door, and out of the rooftop.

Away from him.

#the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart #ikemen vampire #ikevamp theo

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darkpoisonouslove · 4 years ago

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3, 6, 8, 10 for the new year writer asks :)

Thanks! :D

3. Which of your fics was most different from what you usually write?

If we’re talking content, then I’d say that A Taste of Clouds Doesn’t Have to Chase Away Your Smile is definitely what felt most different from my typical fic because it is fluff and a Bakery AU. Things I am not likely to read, let alone write. It was definitely a surprise but a well-liked one both on my end and the fic readers’ (I think). It was interesting trying to keep the angst to a minimum and focusing on a more carefree and playful “plot”. I rate my own banter 10/10, too! That was super fun to write!

From a technical PoV I’d say that What’s in the Heart of the Sun? is the most different thing I have written this year because it is a poem and the only one from this year (if you don’t count one original poem I also wrote and posted). I have always said that poetry is not my cup of tea but I actually enjoyed writing that and I love how it turned out. Also, it was definitely the right format for the idea that I had.

6. What’s your favorite piece of dialogue you wrote this year?

Can it be from a non-published fic? Because I wrote something in an outline a few days ago and just... Take a look for yourself:

“I have always needed to be the center of someone’s universe.”

“That’s because you’re a person that can take care of an entire universe. And you always make me feel like one. Like the one you want to be in.”

“That’s because you’re the most gracious universe that has touched me.”

I mean... What is this actual poetry I have just written????? I have no idea where this came from but it’s soft and beautiful and just... makes my heart melt and spill out in tears... but those are the good kind.

8. Which fic this year was most fun to write?

This question is actually making me sick because I just realized how long it has been since writing was actually fun. Lately I have been writing because I feel like I have to since I have so many things to do that I simply MUST work on them in order to get them all finished. I am not really in the mood, however, and it isn’t all that fun to write. It is more going through the motions than anything else and I just hate it. It can’t go on like that so I will have to find a way to get myself out of this hole and find a way to make it fun again.

Anyway, most fun fic of 2020 was Sleepover Like We’ve Never Had Before since I had some concerns about it before I started writing but those were quelled more or less by the time the first words made it in the document so the process of writing it was actually pretty fun. And the thematic of that fic is lighter, not completely without angst but enough to allow for a fun experience while writing it. I feel like the process over writing that fic was the smoothest out of everything I have written this year when you take both technical difficulties and emotional effect in consideration.

10. What, if anything, are you going to try to do differently in your writing in the new year?

Return to my more concise method of story-telling. I feel like I get into unnecessarily winded descriptions sometimes which definitely started with that infamous chapter 4 of A Home You Never Knew How to Have. I was trying to get into the hang of describing things and showing instead of telling and I ended up with too many words and sometimes even repeating the same concepts in different paragraphs by only wording them differently. It is why I ended up writing such long things this year but I was looking at an outline the other day and it had significantly less descriptions, yet it was still clear and emotion inducing. I don’t know how well that will work because sometimes I love my “poetic” way of writing and that requires longer sentences and a substantially higher amount of words but there is just something that feels unnecessary in my writing at this point and I will try to pinpoint it and remove it. There’s definitely a lot more to improve still but it will have to happen gradually because I simply do not have energy to spare and I have a lot more things to do that also require time and attention.

#ask #her-majesty-wears-jeans #my writing #my writing process #my fanfic #about me #personal #2020 in words

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the-end-of-art · 4 years ago

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Sewn into his jacket an incoherent note

How to Make Love, Write Poetry, & Believe in God by Nin Andrews

A few weeks ago, I was part of a Hamilton-Kirkland College alumnae poetry reading, and after the reading a woman asked a simple question: “How do you write a poem?” I didn’t have an answer so I suggested a few books by poets like John Hollander, Mary Oliver, and Billy Collins. The woman said she had read books like that, but they didn’t help. She wanted something else, like a genuine operating manual—a step by step explanation.

I, too, love instruction manuals, especially those manuals on how to perform magic: write a poem or know God or make love, if only love were something that could be made. Manuals offer such promise. Yes, you, too, can enter the bee-loud glade and the Promised Land and have an orgasm.

I love the idea that my mind could be programmed like a computer to spit out poems on demand—poems with just the right number of lines, syllables, metaphors, meanings, similes, images . . . And with no clichés, no matter how much I love those Tom, Dick and Harry’s with their lovely wives, as fresh as daisies. I can set them in any novel or town in America, and they will have sex twice a week, always before ten at night, never at the eleventh hour, and it will not take long,time being of the essence.

I love sex manuals, too: those books that suggest our bodies are like cars. If only we could learn to drive them properly, bliss would be a simple matter of inserting a key, mastering the steering wheel, signaling our next moves, knowing the difference between the brakes and the gas pedal, and of course, following the speed limit.

A depressive person by nature, I am also a fan of how-to books on God, faith, happiness, the soul, books that suggest a divine presence is always here. I just need to find it, or wake up to it, or turn off my doubting brain. That even now, my soul is like a bird in a cage. If I could sit still long enough and listen closely, it might rest on my open palm and sing me a song.

God, poetry, sex, they offer brief moments of bliss, glimpses of the ineffable, and occasional insights into that which does not translate easily into daily experience, or loses its magic when explained.

In college, I took classes in religion, philosophy and poetry, and I studied sex in my spare time—my first roommate and I staying up late, pondering the pages of The Joy of Sex. As a freshman, I auditioned my way into an advanced poetry writing class by composing the single decent poem I wrote in my college years. The poem, an ode to cottage cheese, came to me in a flash as a vision nestled on a crisp bed of iceberg lettuce. Does cottage cheese nestle? I don’t know, but the professor kept admiring that poem. He said all my other poems paled by comparison.

This was in the era of the sexual revolution,long before political correctness and the Me-Too movement. My roommate, obsessed with getting laid, said we women should have been given a compass to navigate the sexual landscape. She liked to complain that she’d had only one orgasm in her entire life, and she wanted another. “What if I am a one-orgasm wonder?” she worried. The subject of orgasms kept us awake, night after night.

In religion class, my professor told the famous story about Blaise Pascal who had a vision of God that was so profound, his life seemed dull and meaningless forever afterwards. He never had another vision. But he had sewn into his jacket an incoherent note to remind him of the singular luminous experience.

The next day in religion class, a student stood up and announced that the professor was wrong—about Pascal, God, everything. The student knew this because he was God’s friend. He even knew His first name, and what God was thinking. The professor smiled sadly, put his arm around the student, and led him out of the classroom, down the steps and into the counselor’s office. When the professor returned, he warned us that if we ever thought we knew God, we should check ourselves into a mental institution. Lots of insane people know God intimately.

But, I wondered, what would God (or the transcendent—or whatever word you might choose for it: the muse, love, the orgasm, the soul, the higher self) think of us? For example, what would a muse think of a writer trying, begging, praying to enter the creative flow? All writers know it—that moment when inspiration happens. The incredible high. And the opposite, when words cling to the wall of the mind like sticky notes but never make it onto your tongue or the page.

What would an orgasm think of all the people seeking it so fervently yet considering it dirty, embarrassing, unmentionable? And then lying about it. “Did you have one?” a man might ask. “Yes,” his lover nods. But every orgasm knows it cannot be had. Or possessed. Or sewn into the lining of a coat. No one “has” an orgasm. At least not for long.

What did God think of Martin Luther, calling out to him in terror when a lightning bolt struck near his horse, “Help! I’ll become a monk!” And later, when he sought relief from his chronic constipation and gave birth to the Protestant Reformation on the lavatory—a lavatory you can visit today in Wittenberg, Germany.

I don’t want to evaluate Luther’s source of inspiration. But I do want to ponder the question: How do you write a poem? Is there a way to begin?

I think John Ashbery gave away one secret in his poem, “The Instruction Manual:” that it begins with daydreaming. Imagination. And the revelation that the mind contains its own magical city, its own Guadalajara, complete with a public square and bands and parading couples that you can visit this enchanted town for a limited time before you must turn your gaze back to the humdrum world.

But a student of Ashbery’s might cringe at the suggestion that poetry is merely an act of the imagination. In order to master the dance, one must know the steps. And Ashbery was a master. So many of his poems follow a kind of Hegelian progression, traveling from the concrete to the abstract to the absolute. Or what Fichte described as a dialectical movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. Fichte also wrote that consciousness itself has no basis in reality. I wonder if Ashbery would have agreed.

In college I wrote an inane paper, comparing Ashbery’s poetry to a form of philosophical gardening in which the poet arranges the concrete, meaning the plants or words, in such an appealing order that they create the abstract, or the beauty, desired. Thus, the reader experiences the absolute, or a sense of wonder at the creation as the whole thing sways in the wind of her mind.

Is there a basis in reality for wonder? Or poetry? I asked. Or are we only admiring illusions, the beautiful illusions the poet has created? How I loved questions like that. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Fichte and Hegel and Ashbery and write mystical and incomprehensible books. I complained to my mother that no matter how hard I tried, I could not compose an actual poem or philosophical treatise—I was trying to write treatises, too. “That’s good,” she said. “Poets and philosophers are too much in their heads, and not enough in the world.”

I didn’t argue with her and tell her that not all poets are like Emily Dickinson. Or say that Socrates was put to death for being too much in the world, for angering the public with his Socratic method of challenging social mores, and earning himself the title, “the gadfly of Athens.”

Instead, I thought, That’s it! If I want to be a poet, I just need to separate my head from the world. Or at least turn off the noise of the world. And seek solitude, as Wordsworth suggested, in order to recollect in tranquility. I imagined myself going on a retreat or living in a cave, studying the shadows on the wall. Letting them speak to me or seduce me or dance with me.

The shadows, I discovered, are not nice guests. Sometimes they kept me awake all night, talking loudly, making rude comments, using all the words I never said aloud. “Hush,” I told them. “No one wants to hear that.” Sometimes they took on the voices of the dead and complained I hadn’t told their stories yet or right. Sometimes they sulked and bossed me about like a maid, asking for a cup of tea, a biscuit, a little brandy, a nap. One nap was never enough. When I obeyed and closed my eyes, they recited the poems I wanted to write down. “You can’t open your eyes until we’re done,” they said, as if poetry were a game of memory, or hide and seek in the mind. Other times they wandered away and down the dirt road of my past, or lay down in the orchard and counted the peaches overhead. Whatever they did or said, I watched and listened.

That’s how I began writing my first real poems. I knew not to disobey the shadows. I knew not toturn my back on them and look towards the light as Plato suggested—Plato who wanted to banish the poets and poetry from his Republic.I knew to not answer the door if the man from Porlock came knocking.

To this day I am grateful for the darkness. For the shadows it creates in my mind. It is thanks to them I have written another book, The Last Orgasm, a book whose title might make people cringe. But isn’t that what shadows do? And much of poetry, too? Dwell on topics we are afraid to look at in the light?

(https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2020/09/how-to-make-love-write-poetry-believe-in-god-by-nin-andrews.html)

Five prose poems by Nin Andrews (formatting better at http://newflashfiction.com/5-prose-poems-by-nin-andrews/)

Duplicity

after Henri Michaux “Simplicity”

When I was just a young thing, my life was as simple as a sunrise. And as predictable. Day after day I went about doing exactly as I pleased. If I saw a lovely man or women, or beauty in any of its shapes and forms and flavors, well, I simply had to have it. So I did. Just like that. Boom! I didn’t even need a room.

Slowly, I matured. I learned a bit of etiquette. Manners, I discovered can have promising side effects. I even began carrying a bottle of champagne wherever I went, and a bed. Not that the beds lasted long. I wasn’t the kind to go easy on the alcohol or the furnishings, nor was I interested in sleep. It never ceased to amaze me how quickly men drift off. Women, many of them, kept me going night after night. You know how inspiring women are.

But then, alas, I grew tired of them as well. I began to envy those folks who curl up into balls each night, their bodies as heavy as tombstones. I tried curling up with them, slowing my breath, entering into their dreams. What dreams! To think I had been missing out all along! That’s when I became a Zen master, at one with the night. Now I teach classes on peace, love, abstinence. At last I have found bliss, I tell my followers. The young, they don’t believe it. But really, I ask you. Would I lie?

The Broken Promise

after Heberto Padilla, “The Promise”

There was a time when I promised to write you a thousand love poems. When I said every day is a poem, and every poem is in love with you. But then the poems rebelled. They became a junta of angry women, impossible to calm or translate, each more vivid, sultry, seductive than the next. Some stayed inside and sulked for weeks, demanding chocolates, separate rooms, maid service. Others wanted to be carted around like queens. Still others took lovers and kept the neighbors up, moaning at all hours of the day and night. One skinny girl (remember her? the one with flame-colored hair?) moved away. She went back to that shack down the road where we first met. At night she lay down in the orchard behind the house and let the dark crawl over her arms and legs. In the end even her dreams turned to ash and blew away in a sudden gust of wind.

Little Big Man

after Russell Edson “Sleep”

There was once an orgasm that could not stop shrinking. Little big man, his friend called him, watching as he grew smaller and smaller with each passing night, first before making love, then before even the mention of making love, then before even the mention of the mention of making love. Oh, what a pathetic little thing he was.

One night he tried reading, Think and Grow Big, but it only caused him to shrink further inside himself. Oh, to grow large and tall as I once was, he sighed. What he needed, he knew, was a trainer with a whip and chains. Someone to teach him to jump through hoops and swing from a trapeze and swallow fire until he blazed ever higher into the night. Yes, he shuddered. Yes! as he imagined it. A tiny wisp of smoke escaped his lips.

Questions to Determine if You Are Washed Up

after Charles Baudelaire, “Get Drunk!”

Do you feel washed up lost, all alone? Do you fear that time is passing you by like a train for which you have no ticket, no seat? That you have lived too long in the solitude of your room and empty mind, that now you are but a slave of sorrow? Or is it regret? Do you no longer taste the wine of life on your lips, tongue, throat? Is there not even even a chance of intoxication? Bliss? No poetry or song above or below the hips? No love in the wind, the waves, in every or any fleeting and floating thing? No castles in your air? No pearls in your oysters? Are you wearing a pair of drawstring pants?

Remembering Her

after Herberto Padilla

This is the house where she first met you. This is the room where she first said your name as if it were a song. This is the table where she undressed you, stripping away your petals, leaves, your filmy white roots and sorrows. And there on the floor is the stone you picked up each morning, the stone you clung to night after night. Sometimes she kicked it aside. Sometimes she placed in on the sill and blew it out the window as her presence filled you like a glow, and you thought for an instant, I, too, can fly.

#Nin Andrews #poem #poet #poetry

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ask-the-clergy-bc · 5 years ago

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what kind of hobbies do the papas and copia have?

(Trying to get into bullet point format rather than JUST paragraphs for multiple points- let me know how this reads! Feedback always appreciated!)

Papa Nihil:

~One of the biggest hobbies we have seen Nihil do is dip into jazz, especially with his saxophone! He has been playing for years, and is well versed in a few different instruments; but the saxophone is his indisputable favorite. He’s always bemoaned he never made a Jazz album. Even with his lungs, Nihil refuses to put down the instrument. Yes, he loved to sing, but Nihil feels so much more personal connection when playing an instrument. There is something very fulfilling about it!

~ Nihil absolutely loves anything to do with horror movies or vintage films! Believe it or not, he’s always had a taste with analyzing horror films no matter how b-rated or cheesy. It’s something he has always done with Imperator since the 70′s. Ever since VHSes were invented, he has started a VERY big collection of horror movies. Chances are he has seen every single one of them at least twice. Nihil’s favorites are the Omen and other Satanist based films.

~The Grand Papa has a small bit of a gambling streak, namely with dice or cards. If there is one way to get Nihil to play ANYTHING with you, it’s having a fresh deck of cards just waiting to be split! Nihil is always down for ‘sweetening the deal’ and playing for actual money (or hard candies.) Loves poker, Texas hold em, and anything you can win a pot in! Honestly, he’s so good you might as well not count on winning a giant pile of werther’s originals. Nihil wins EVERY time! Will also DESTROY anyone in Uno.

Papa I:

~No one is surprised by this, but his religious studies are his #1 hobby. Papa never gets sick of learning about his own religion, or that of others. The man eats, breathes, thinks, and LIVES Lucifer. It’s a way of life. Find a job you love and you never work a day in your life- that’s what Papa gets to live! He has thousands of papers of notes and has even published his own journal articles and books!

~Calligraphy is his special hidden talent, and he is DAMN good at it! It was something he picked up when he was younger and really nurtured during his Seminary times. A lot of the newer official Clergy documents are actually penned by Papa himself! He has a very steady hand the undying patience to do some very intricate work. If you look in his office he has tons of the old fashioned pens and ink wells. Chances are, if you get a document written in such fine cursive it was probably made by Papa!

~ Papa has a green thumb and love of gardening. You typically won’t see him in the Ministry gardens, but he has his own little make shift green house. As a magic and witch craft practitioner, you need a lot of good ingredients. Lots of herbs and other banes as well. So Papa had to learn how to husband specialty plants with very specific needs. He has time tables and measuring cups for all his individually potted plants!

Papa II:

~Besides partying and hooking up, if you count those? This usually surprises a lot of people, but he enjoys cooking! He’s actually a very accomplished chef! Granted, Papa is SUPER picky about which recipes, ingredients, AND equipment he will use- but he loves getting to cook. Papa’s favorite meals are a lot of traditional Italian dishes but with modern twists. If he so desired, he’d make himself an eight course meal and it would be flawless to the last bite!

~ Along with his cooking he likes to do anything with wine. Mainly quality vintages and sampling them to pair with meals. He has traveled to MANY vineyards in his free time and has a HUGE collection that’s only rivaled by Papa III! It’s actually something they have done together growing up! Papa has even helped make his own, but very few know about it. He’s waiting for the bottles to age before he even samples his own creation.

~The man bare knuckle boxes. He has since he was a boy, and is actually a formidable opponent! As he has aged he doesn’t partake as MUCH and rather view professional matches. But don’t let him being out of practice fool you. He was known for breaking noses and a killer knock out punch!

Papa III:

~ Papa actually has a real love of reading and poetry when the mood strikes him. Not a lot of people peg him to be super into anything quiet and deep, but he has a fondness for both! Papa is actually very talented in poem writing and prose of all sorts (I mentioned before he actually helped write a LOT of songs.) His favorite novels are an odd lot, but he enjoys the classics like everyone else. The more engaging and interesting the better.

~I mentioned in the pet post how Papa horse back rides, but that’s not his only favorite sport. He’s a sucker for fencing! Back in his 20′s he actually met a fencing instructor that taught him a few moves and tricks of the trade, and he’s been hooked ever since! He’s not a power house like Papa II, so it was a good sport to help him learn to fight in a different way. Papa will also gladly admit he feels like a fantasy prince in a story book when he wields his blade!

~Say what you want about his suit in ‘He Is’ but Papa is a self proclaimed fashionista! Papa has always been a lover of all types of art, but fashion has a special place in his heart. It’s why he was so adamant about his dead astaire suit! If you catch him out of his regalia or suit, he usually has something very stylish on. Picks everything out from his socks, watch, shirt, and even sun glasses. It’s very fun to make yourself a walking piece of art with such fine looks!

Cardinal Copia:

~You get a glimpse of two of his favorite hobbies in the ‘Rats’ video- ballet/dancing and horse back riding! Copia doesn’t really dance as much on stage, but he has been classically trained since he was a young man. Copia never did anything with it besides keeping in shape and doing it for fun. He jokes he could probably do the entirety of ‘Swan Lake’ if he so wished. But who has time for that when you’re only head lining YOUR OWN TOUR?

~Horseback riding is his other favorite, and one he has been trained in for YEARS. Copia doesn’t have as much time to practice or head to the stable these days. It used to be a more active hobby for him, thanks to the opportunities given to him by his rank and pay. Sometimes he yearns to go back to it. Never considered himself a competitive rider and just really enjoyed the thrill of it.

~Since he’s so busy Copia sticks to his intellectual hobbies. Namely reading, puzzles, and languages. He’s particularly fond of studying dead or difficult languages, and prides in how many he knows! Right now his biggest study is in Ghoulish, though with slow progress. IT definitely helps he’s stuck on tour with SEVEN ghouls! Copia can now say a few words and phrases in Ghoulsih (though his ghouls laugh at his ‘human accent’.)

#the band ghost #ghost bc #Ghost headcanon #papa nihil #papa emeritus i #Papa Emeritus II #papa emeritus iii #cardinal copia

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beatrice-otter · 4 years ago

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Fic Title Meme

Taken from anghraine and tielan Look at the most recent 20 fanwork titles on your AO3 account. (I'm assuming this isn't the most recent begun/completed fics, but the most recently updated for any reason.) 1. How many are you happy with? Eight. Which is high, for me; I routinely hate my titles, but two of those come from canons with really strong naming conventions that I could just go with and and one was an episode tag where I could play off the name of the episode and one was based on a musical and so I could just take a line from one of the songs in the musical and whaddaya know, it both fit and commented on the story and canon! 2. How many are ... not great? Three or so? I don't often hate my titles, so it's not like they're terrible, just, you know, mostly mediocre. 3. How many did you scramble for at the last minute? Eight. It's usually more, but as I said in question 1, some fandoms and types of story are more helpful in naming fic than others. 4. How many did you know before you started writing/creating, or near the beginning? None! Titles are pretty much always the last thing I think of, even if it doesn't quite qualify as "scrambling at the last minute." Although I just uploaded a ficathon fic (not yet revealed, and hence not in this list) where the title was the first thing I thought of and the entire reason I chose that fandom to write for in the first place (it wasn't what we matched on). 5. How many are quotes from songs or poems? Five, I think? There are two that I have no idea, which probably means I was going through, like, poetry.com searching on keywords and stuff. 6. How many are other quotes? Does, like, a saying count? If so, one. "Home Is Not A Place " (Star Wars Legends, Zahn Trilogy) 7. Which best reflects the plot of the story/content of the fanwork? Undoutedly "In Which Mrs. Jane Dupree Has An Adventure (The Finding Herself Remix)" (the poetry of A.A. Milne) and "In Which Cimorene Settles In as King's Chief Cook and Librarian, and Deals with Politics" (Enchanted Forest Chronicles), those being the ones where I used the canonical naming convention of telling you exactly what's going to happen in that chapter/fic. Probably also "Kitty and Georgy (The Healing Old Hurts Remix)" (Pride & Prejudice) because again, the remix title format is designed to explicitly tell you the content of the story. "Assisting Mr. Wayne" (Batman Beyond) is also pretty, hm, self-explanatory. I'm not sure that any of them are more or less reflective of the plot than any of the others, it's kind of a tie. 8. Which best reflects the theme of the story? Definitely "Will the cycle be unbroken" (BSG 2003) because it's all about time travel to stop the awful march of "all this has happened before, all this will happen again." 9. Which best reflects the character voice of the story/POV of the fanwork? "Here We Are Together" (My Fair Lady) for the simple reason that it's quoting the canonical words of the viewpoint character. 10. Which is your favourite title? "Will the cycle be unbroken" (BSG 2003) because it flows so organically from the story. Also, I came up with it in the middle of the writing process, which is one of the reasons it fits the story so well. It matches both in theme and content, because to come up with the hybrid dialogue I spent a lot of time searching for quotes and lines of poetry I could adapt; the hybrid says very little that isn't a quote or allusion in canon, and I wanted to follow that convention. So a modified quote felt very apt.

#writing #meme #archive of our own

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mysticsparklewings · 5 years ago

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at the edge of the world monochrome

finds color

in your eyes

____ We are now 1/3 of the way through NaPoWriMo and this was the simplest prompt yet! I don't know how to act! Said simple prompt was to make use of a relatively modern form of poetry that takes inspiration from Haiku: Hay(na)ku, which asks you to create a poem with words grouped as such: 1 for line 1, 2 for line 2, and 3 for line 3. And for those like me who want to understand where the name came from, I jumped down the rabbit hole for you; Apparently, this form of poetry was known for a time as "Pinoy Haiku," but ended up being changed after both of those words carried some negative connotation in regards to the colonization of the Philipines, and was changed to the current name after the Filipino expression "hay naku," which apparently is used a lot like the word, "oh," is in English. On the one hand, I'm thankful for such simple poetic requirements, considering today's prompt could've just as easily been a long and horrendous prompt with rules/requirements a mile long (I'm looking at you, Day 5). But on the other hand, I have to agree with the sentiments of another writer that I stumbled upon while looking for inspiration; with so few words to work with, there isn't really room for more than one image or idea contained in one hay(na)ku, and that can be less satisfying than a form of poetry that can hold at least two or more ideas at a time. Also, it's deceptively simple in its structure; When you only have six words to use, every word--arguable every letter-counts. And yet, it feels even more hollow (at least to me for my writing preferences) to just slap words down and cut the prepositions in the name of squeezing more "words that matter." To that end, though, I realized that the hay(na)ku is really just a different way of writing another form of...poetry? (I guess?)...The six-word story. This is interesting to me because six-word stories can often be very deep and very dark, despite being so short. Additionally, I have once-upon-a-time come up with some six-word stories waaaayyyy back in my 365-Day Mini-Magnet Challenge, so much like yesterday's concrete/calligram prompt, once I started thinking of it that way, today's prompt was technically not unfamiliar territory to me. Of course, all of the above does not mean this poem was a cakewalk to come up with. It still took a bit of thought, and I ultimately decided I needed at least two hay(na)kus to satisfy my own wants. Funnily enough, I found in trying to come up with two poems that had strong imagery both separately and put together, I found at that there are quite a few song lyrics I like that can be broken up quite nicely into this format. But I refrained from temptation and used none of those. With so few words, it kinda felt like cheating to just use song lyrics I didn't write, even if I gave credit where credit was due. Also, I found that as I mentioned, six-word stories can get very dark very quickly, and likewise, I came up with a few of these that weren't technically bad, just...dark. And I didn't really want dark, this time. I wanted something a bit brighter, something slightly more inline with FridgePoetProject's work. So naturally, I went and looked back on some of her mini-magnetic creations hoping an idea would strike me in the process. If you ever have a look at her work, stars and celestial bodies appear quite frequently. And while I do like that, I know I just did a kind-of star themed poem for Day 7, and I'm sure in the next twenty days I'll have at least one or two (possibly more) opportunities to infuse stars into the mini-magnets. The same thing with gardens/flowery images, Day 5 and Day 9 both use that, and I want to space out my themes to keep things fresh-ish. Somewhere along the way, I grabbed on to the idea of rainbows/color and came up with "I / find color / in your arms," Which was good, but I wanted something a little more dramatic and slightly less literal. (Not that that phrase is particularly literal, but the message was still a bit too direct for my taste.) From there though, I got the idea to "find color" in the mandala. I.E. one half could be grayscale, the other in color. The first hay(na)ku poem being for the grayscale, the second for the color. After toying around with the words, I nailed down the second poem as you see it here, and I went back over some of the darker poems I'd already come up with and grabbed "at / the edge / of the world" for the first. For context, the second poem I originally had paired with it, before all the color ideas, was: "here / we are / together yet apart," Which I thought hit entirely too close to home for the state of the world right now. If I came out with it six months ago, it probably would've sounded much lighter, more wistful. But right now that string combined just sounds...accurate and depressing. Not what I wanted today. But I liked my monochrome/edge of the world pairing, so that's what I went with. The came the mandala. I picked out a rainbow of colors in my Gelly Roll Moonlight pens, as I know their ink flows well and the colors are nice and bright (though the fluorescent ones never show up quite as nice on camera or scan as they do in person), and then since I don't have the lovely new grayscale Moonlight pens (but I want them so badly!) I improvised with a black and some gray/silver glitter pens from another brand. Which, you can't really see it here, but I think it's a nice juxtaposition for the rainbow colors to be flat but bright, while the grayscale has a lot of glitter so it's not quite so dull. (Can we make that a new expression? "Even rainbows can be flat and grayscale can have glitter"?) As for actually drawing the mandala, I just used my mandala grid as always, but I started but only drawing the colored side (using a ruler at the very beginning so I knew where my stopping line was, but after I had a few rows done I didn't need it anymore), and the once it was done I went back and filled out the grayscale side. And I was doing really well until I got to the last couple of rows and made a bit of a mistake, but I'm not going to point it out more than that since there's a good chance it will just as easily go unnoticed since I did do what little I could to fix it without ruining the mandala's structure and flow. Beyond that, there's really not much symbolism in this mandala. For the shapes, I was really just trying to go with what felt like good ways to squeeze all the colors in and hopefully wouldn't be too hard to replicate on the other half. Amazing how so much thought goes into two so-short poems, yeah? I have a feeling I'm going to say this a lot before NaPoWriMo is over, but so far I think this might be my favorite...Or maybe I just like the change of pace for both poem and mandala. Now, let's see if this simple prompt trend continues tomorrow or if there's another doozie waiting in the wings... ____ Artwork/Poem © me, MysticSparkleWings Inspired by FridgePoetProject ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble | Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

#napowrimo #haynaku

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anthonymbarr · 6 years ago

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Trying to Get a Job: Sophistry and Contingency

I graduate in a couple months and have had occasion to take stock of who I am now in light of these past four years. I’d like to think that my liberal arts degree represents a certain kind of formation. I’d like to think that I’ve become a kinder person, more thoughtful, better disciplined, well prepared for a lifetime of service to my community. As importantly, I’d also like to think that I’ve developed a cohesive vision, one that coheres internally and corresponds well with the objective world that exists outside my own mind. It is regarding that latter hope, set in amidst the deep-seated fear that my education has not succeeded in reconciling me to capital T Truth, that I want to explore in this mini essay.

In the last few weeks, I’ve had two intensive phone interviews for prestigious post-undergraduate fellowships, and in both of these interviews, I was grilled on an essay I wrote about the contingency of ideas. My claim, as an amateur historian, is that our thinking is always necessarily bound to our particular place and time. This isn’t an issue if one is a sophist, concerned not with Justice, but merely “Athenian notions of justice in my own time.” And while Plato is hard on the sophists for being sellouts, producing the best arguments that money can buy in order to win in the courtroom or on the senate floor, I think it is rash to dismiss the sophists outright. Seen in the most charitable light, the sophists are both intellectually honest and humble, and so do not claim to speak about universal ideas or timeless truths because they know how easily we mistake our own contingent thoughts for some kind of profound revelation. Fair enough, my interviewers said, but what if we want to speak about Justice? What if we want our politics to conform to some standard of the Good; heck, what if we want our own lives to approximate some measured form of the Good Life? Can we escape contingency, or we constrained to sophistry, whether that’s what we think we’re doing or not? That’s an open question in my mind, and the one that I think will haunt me the most as a graduate.

The Sunday School answer to this question is Jesus. Something about the Incarnation, I say, something about the Divine entering into the particularities and contingencies of human history. I mean, it’s a plausible response, and I got the fellowship offer, but really? Is that the best argument to be made? Or maybe it’s just that we can only ever get to the “universals” through the concrete particulars, the way that the best writers are hyper specific in their poems and novels, the way that Shakespeare speaks to the human condition not through abstract theories of love but through characters like Romeo or Beatrice. I’ve read enough Wittgenstein to have a vocabulary for describing public meaning and shared usage. Nobody would read Shakespeare today if they didn’t find him meaningful, despite the contextual distance or even the conceptual gaps. That has to count for something, right?

I don’t want to suggest that the liberal arts have turned me into a full-blown relativist. I do think that some conceptions of the good life help us to flourish as persons and communities better than others. I do also believe in making value judgments in all domains of human knowledge and experience, perhaps to the chagrin of my classmates in Advanced Poetry Writing who mistakenly believe that the subjectivity of art magically turns bad (emotivistic or simply banal) poetry into something laudable (it, uh, does not.) But as I see it, the people most overtly confident in the rightness of their own ideas tend to be, for example, cowardly conservatives (who won’t ever read Judith Butler but will maintain that gender is a timeless given) or progressive shrills (fully convinced that they have the moral high ground and eager to remind you of it) or a whole array of persons who have surrendered the imperative to think and consequently grown sterile in mind. Why think if you have nothing left to think through, if all the answers are readily apparent to you?

I think there are two concerns I have about my present state of mind. The first is that, uh, the very capabilities that have turned me into an exceptional intellectual continue to complicate religious affiliation. I have no problems submitting to church authority: I became Catholic in part because of that authority structure. But a belief in the kind of totalizing narrative on offer in Christianity is extremely hard to sustain when everything in my training has taught me to deconstruct those kinds of narrative in service to illuminating contingency. St. Paul knew the Greeks wanted to escape contingency which is why he said the particularity of Christ is foolishness to them. You’re goddamn right it is. But oh well, there are worse things than being duped, says the pragmatist William James, and anyway the Mass is a beautiful aesthetic experience if nothing else. Still, it’s hard to profess a creed on those days when one is convinced that it’s just a pretty story.

The second concern, perhaps more immediately felt as I endeavor to secure some form of my employment for myself is that being paid to be a sophist is, uh, deeply inauthentic, and as Charles Taylor has shown us, ours is a cultural context that conditions us to desire a sense of total authenticity in our own lives, and to demand it of others. We hate hypocrisy in others, and we hate it in ourselves which is why we are so desperate to rationalize our behavior or smooth over contradictions in our own thinking. Practically speaking, I know I could make a boatload of cash writing policy for ideologically-motivated thinktank or crafting persuasive campaigns as a “brand storyteller” for some worthless marketing firm, or performing the smiles and handshakes that constitute the bulk of the work in “wealth management.” The problem, of course, is that it’s all bullshit, and who wants to spend their life in service to bullshit. Okay, so what other paths are there for a gifted mind in late-stage capitalism? Teaching is always viable though less money there of course. But then the problem of authenticity pops up: are you serving the ideals of a Christian school (”make disciples”) or the ideals of liberal democracy (”productive citizens”) or what exactly? The Athenians killed Socrates for disturbing the social order, but it rewarded the Sophists because they prepared the youth to function within the ideals and institutions of their particular place and time. What else can we say about Justice Kavanaugh except that his preppy education served to form him into the kind of Supreme Court Justice that can be relied on to advance the particular positions that the conservative vanguard require of him? He’s certainly no genius. And he’s probably average or below in morals. But he knows the job. The problem, of course, is that it’s bullshit.

Okay, so back to that opening paragraph. I think I have become kinder, more nuanced in my thinking, more disciplined in my writing. And there are certainly worse things than an inclination toward sophistry. I’m never going to be a Hitler, for example, because that would require too much confidence in my own ideals. And what of the salvation of my soul? Well, taking Christianity at its own word, whatever salvation means requires moving through contingency not around it. If the Incarnation means anything, surely it means that. And what of employment? Once the deferment period ends and the student loan payments come due, I think I’ll be less concerned about the bullshit of being a corporate sellout. Anyway, if you’ve been paying attention at all, dear reader, you know better than to trust anything I’m saying in this final paragraph. What, did you expect a tidy bow to wrap this up? There is no such bow.

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zorilleerrant · 4 years ago

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Poetry

19 People Who Left in the Middle of a Date Share Their Crazy Stories So I read this article (of that title) and it pissed me off that all of the women’s stories were about having their boundaries violated and all of the men’s stories were about wOmEn TaLk tOo MuCh, or like, that’s how it was narrativized anyway. It didn’t quite work out the way I wanted, but that’s found poetry for you - all the words are actually from the original article.

male privilege is This was in response to yet another one of those reddit threads going around about dudes being like “what?? sexism exists???” and then refusing to read the 9000 studies about it people were linking for them. I don’t know why so many of those were going around at the time? Like I remember why sexism was a major point of discussion, just that specific thing, like specifically, groups of dudes for the first time hearing about women’s life experiences. It pissed me off so I wrote a poem about it.

poem This is sort of a poem and sort of a joke because fuck the environment I guess; it was topical at the time I think.

there is a demon A poem about femininity, bisexuality, and mental illness. Our narrator is, I think, a makeup youtuber? Or something like that. This was written in response to people saying just awful things about makeup hobbyists.

queer is not a slur Just a poem bitching at people about the ‘omg q slur’ nonsense.

the two genders A poem about how stupid gender essentialism is, and how people apply it to literal newborn babies.

untitled poem ???

ROY G. BIV A poem about what does and does not exist. Implicitly about LGBT+ gatekeeping but there’s nothing direct in it. I like this one a lot.

flag a poem on why I didn’t like the Philly pride flag back when everyone was gushing about how pure and perfect it was.

pride a poem that I think was mostly bitching about people being like ‘don’t do xyz you’re ruining pride!’ or like gatekeeping or whatever. not sure if it stands up without context

poetry isn’t real just a micropoem about poetry, the most common topic for poetry

growing up depression poetry

a few points bullet list formatted poem about writing and writing advice

Let’s Talk About Slurs it’s a poem about people who smugly claim they’d never say a slur

tw villanelle yeah I only write villanelles what about it? anyway this one has a bunch of violent rhetoric and bad opinions; it’s from the perspective of antis. it’s not very good but the rhymes sound nice

slurs poem musing on what I call myself and what other people call me

there’s error in translation poem about art and how we interpret and react to it

there are only two genders: limericks and shut up it’s a limerick about transphobes I don’t know what you want

of course it was a poem about pride and how it gets historicized. it’s mediocre and did not convey the point I intended it to

ten seconds vent poem about how tagging is hard

cassandra’s gift vent poem about censorship and purity culture

dear abby, I poem about being nonbinary

Reasons why you have a headache, a partial list people on the internet keep saying horrible things, and sometimes it just hurts your brain. I think this poem was about racism in hollywood but I don’t really remember so take it how you will

tw g slur vent poem about how I’m. queer. not gay. like fuck

hungry vent poem about gendered eating habits and disordered eating

it’s just a poem that’s not exactly rigorous a poem about being nonbinary

How To Make Yourself Understood a poem about how hard communication is. there is no actual advice in this poem and it will in fact probably make it harder rather than easier to communicate.

learn your history poem about the sanitizing of history

the end of the world yk a little song parody based on a post pretty much most people agreed sounded like one of a handful of songs

but isn’t it their right? a poem about rights and wrongs. given the timing I think this is about antimaskers or possibly antivaxxers but I can’t remember. tw for like most kinds of human rights abuses

the trolley not-my-problem a poem about racists and how they just always talk Like That. humorous. also it’s a villanelle it’s my favorite kind of poem

you know I love you, right? poem. big tw for parental abuse and victim blaming

devil’s advocate a poem about playing devil’s advocate and why it’s a goddamn job

safe vent poem about how if you’re multiply marginalized safe spaces suck actually. the rhythm is about right, but the imagery could use word. conveys what it’s meant to convey tho

if you build it vent poem about how no one reads my writing. but better than that makes it sound, honest

But looking back Poem ruminating on what counts as romantic and why people read and treat it that way

#my writing

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gukyi · 7 years ago

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interconnection | myg

⇒ summary: you can never trust anything in the wizarding world. not even your own goddamn journal.

⇒ {hogwarts!au}

⇒ pairing: yoongi x female reader

⇒ word count: 8k

⇒ genre: fluff

⇒ a/n: all poetry in y/n’s journal written by yours truly! obviously, anything written in yoongi’s journal is written by him. also, i know the word count’s pretty short in comparison to my seokjin fic, but a majority of this fic is in messaging format, which explains both the great physical length and the shorter word count. inspired by this drarry fic, which rocks and u should read. edit (04.20.18): the poems in this fic are now formatted strangely because tumblr mobile took away the foundation for this entire piece: the indent. thanks, tumblr mobile, for absolutely nothing.

“all art is quite useless.” — wilde, 1890.

The first thing your mother bought you in Diagon Alley, age eleven, was a worn, brown leather journal, its pages tinted and stained but empty nonetheless. She got it off of the highest shelf in the top corner of the crowded bookstore, stretching her arms and legs to reach it, the last of its kind.

“What’s this for?” You asked as she placed it in your open, waiting palms.

“For you to write in while at Hogwarts,” she said. “I find that words always seem to have a better way of flowing when on paper rather than out loud. Don’t you?”

“I dunno,” you responded, shrugging your little shoulders as you placed the journal in your cauldron along with the rest of your required schoolbooks. “Isn’t it dumb to keep a journal?”

“Only if you treat it as such,” your mother replied, as sage as she always was. “Come, let’s get you a wand.”

With the mention of a wand, your mind wandered far from the beaten leather journal in your cauldron as you skipped out of Flourish and Blott’s, unaware of how significant the journal would end up being in your later years at Hogwarts.

When you first opened the journal on your first night at Hogwarts as an empty-minded eleven-year-old, the blank pages frightened you. A world of words only you could come up with was millions of miles away, and staring at the tan pages wasn’t going to make it come closer. That night, you shut the journal roughly, cursing your mother who wasted her money on a journal that would never be put to use.

Six years later, eleven-year-old you wouldn’t know that journal like you do now, know the feeling of its worn pages and smooth, wrinkling leather, what you have become so keenly familiar with over the years. Sure, this journal doesn’t hold your deepest, darkest secrets nor your wildest dreams directly, but the allusions never end, forever continuing on in each poem you write.

You’ve always been a fan of poetry, ever since your mother taught you about the greatest works of the great poets as a child. Wordsworth, Poe, Keats. They are names you know, names you admire. There was never anything spectacular about Wizard poets, not when everything is easy and everything is simply done with magic. No, people like Poe and Keats and Wordsworth wrote about life like it was a struggle, like there was always something you were missing in it. In a sense, there always is.

Perhaps your Muggleborn background is another factor in your love for poetry, but verse knows no blood status and even the greatest Wizards need to sit down and read a little bit of Eliot once in awhile, you think.

The poetry you write is mundane, nothing compared to the greats that they were, but it is home and it is an odyssey all the same, the words flowing off the page and smeared from how frantic you were when you wrote them.

You cart the notebook around with you wherever you go, knowing that keeping it in the confines of the common room will likely lead to its exposure one way or another. Gryffindors were never really good at keeping out of other people’s business. The journal is as precious to you as your wand, never letting it out of your sight.

It’s not uncommon for students to keep a journal, especially for their first couple years as they adjust to the school, to the sleepless nights and forbidden hallways. What is uncommon is the fact that you’re fast approaching graduation, merely a few months left before you’re thrust into the real world and treated like adults with responsibilities and taxes, and the journal has never left your side, staying with you through every standardized test and every Hogsmeade visit. You are, dare you say, the last of your year to hold onto something as menial as a diary.

“Are you going to keep writing in that after Hogwarts?”

You look up at the sound of the voice, knowing that it’s directed towards you. Your fingers are still holding onto the pages of your open journal, lying on the Gryffindor table in the Great Hall, as you pause, mid-browse.

“This?”

“Yeah.”

“Probably not.”

“Why not?”

“I want to keep it as my school journal. A specific time in my life.”

“But surely, if you’ve written in it for so long, you might as well want to keep going?”

“I feel like seven years is a pretty substantial amount of time to write in a journal.”

“You’ve never run out of room?” Another friend butts in, her potions homework forgotten in front of her. No wonder she’s failing the class; she lets herself get too distracted.

“I asked the librarian for spells to add pages.”

“Oh,” they say.

“Yeah,” you say.

Your journal is not often the topic of conversation between you and your friends. Your friends have long known that the journal is not theirs to look through, so they don’t bother asking, but occasionally they will have questions as they see you scribbling down something before your next class period. It’s strange to see you writing in it so out in the open like you do sometimes, since you often reserve your writing time for when you are curled up in the common room, sitting by the fire as you guard the pages from view. Inspiration, however, strikes at the most inopportune moments.

“What do you write about?” They ask you whenever they catch you jotting something down.

“Art. Love. Work. Emotions. You. Me.”

“Us?”

“All of us.”

“That’s lots of people.”

“Not everybody. Just people that interest me.”

“Who interests you?”

“Those that don’t try to.”

If there’s one thing that your friends complain about, it’s the fact that, whenever you do talk about your journal, your sentences become clipped, fragments of full phrases lacking in conjunctions. It’s not that you don’t want to make your sentences, well, actual sentences, it’s just that you never really want to say too much about your journal. It is yours, after all.

“Well, who are you writing about now?”

“I don’t know.”

Truth is, you don’t. The boy that’s caught your attention this time is nothing but a stranger, someone you’ve never spoken to, a face lost in the sea of students. From his build, he doesn’t look to be much younger than you, meaning he might even be in your year. He’s got platinum bleached hair, the mop the only thing you can make out as he snoozes on some textbook. Next to him is a boy a couple years younger—you recognize him, he’s the Quidditch commentator for most of the matches—prodding him gently with his pointer finger. The platinum boy does not budge.

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“You’re a real mystery, you know that, Y/N? A goddamn mystery,” one of your friends comments, scoffing.

You chuckle to yourself, closing your journal and smiling. “I sure hope so.”

he sleeps to forget or, maybe he sleeps to remember but in his dreams he is somewhere and nowhere and he is everything and nothing all at once. zzzz… his brain says do not let me leave… for i am finally at peace.

You had originally believed that after writing about a person, a stranger, in your journal, you’d go on to forget about them, but that doesn’t seem to be the case this time. Since you wrote that single poem about the platinum-haired boy, fast asleep on a textbook in the Great Hall, you can’t help but notice him everywhere you turn. He’s in the library, in the hallways, in the bleachers of the Quidditch field. It’s his hair—or maybe it’s that soft, hazy smile he has permanently etched onto his lips—that makes him stick out, makes him so easy to spot even in the oceans of students that surround the both of you.

He’s in your year, you’ve found out that much, but you can hardly remember anything about him. You don’t remember him on the train, nor at the Sorting Ceremony, nor in any of your classes. It is only now that he’s left a mark on you, made a wrinkle in your brain that you can’t seem to forget about.

If you were brave, you would speak to him. If you were brave, or daring, or unafraid, you would approach him and say hello, introduce yourself. But you are none of those things, and so all he is is another boy you’ve written about, another student lost in the haze.

Perhaps in a perfect world.

Though, you suppose, if it was a perfect world, you would never have anything interesting to write about.

Shit begins to hit, pelt, the fan while you are eating supper in the Great Hall, surrounded by your friends as your journal lays forgotten on the sidelines, open to a blank page as you happily chat about nothing and everything in particular.

“How’s tutoring going?” You ask your one friend, the one who’s not doing so hot in potions.

“It’s going,” she jokes. “I have a good tutor, I’m just shit at applying myself.”

“Story of my life,” you chuckle.

The chatter goes on like this, friendly banter between buddies as you swallow down the meal in front of you. This is the only time after classes end that you actually get to spend socializing, before you bury yourself under layers and layers of schoolwork. It’s just another night, the days always flowing by like clockwork, no variation with each passing hour.

It’s just another night, until your ridiculously clumsy self somehow manages to elbow a discarded cup of tea, knocking it onto its side and spilling its contents all over your opened journal.

“Oh no,” you declare, not even making to try and clean up the mess, watching the liquid stain your blank pages with futility.

“Y/N! Aren’t you gonna do something?” Your friends exclaim, watching as you stare helplessly at the mess beside you.

“Me? What?”

“Y/N!”

It’s then that you finally come to, shaking your head as the panic overtakes you. You stand up quickly, rushed as you dart to the closest napkin, dabbing it on the spill to soak up whatever hasn’t already damaged your journal.

Your friends are all the help, gathering the disregarded Daily Prophets from that morning and running over. Once you’ve let the tea take its toll, you place your relatively damp journal on top of the newspaper to dry, pushing it down the table so it can get the most air, away from your scraggle of friends as you continue to chat as if the whole incident lay forgotten.

You’re knee deep into a conversation about whether having dragon heartstring or unicorn hair is more beneficial to doing transfiguration, you, a firm believer that dragon heartstring reigns supreme, when a foreign voice invades your discussion.

“Do you write all this stuff?”

You whip your head around to find a Gryffindor by the name of Namjoon, holding your dangling journal between his thumb and his pointer fingers as he shuffles through the pages with his other hand. You can see the tea dripping slowly from the corner of the cover to the newspaper below it. You recognize Namjoon quite well, he’s a tutor, sort of a know-it-all as far as you’re concerned.

“What?” You snap, beginning to feel yourself seethe.

“Do you write this stuff? It’s really good, you know. Very interesting,” he comments like it’s nobody’s fucking business. The problem is, it is very much your goddamn business.

“Were you raised in a barn?” You ask incredulously, rushing up to him and snatching your journal from his fingertips. “Who on this godforsaken Earth taught you that it was perfectly fine to fish through someone else’s journal?”

Namjoon merely smirks, and it makes you frown, disgust lacing your features. “So it is yours, eh, Y/N? Didn’t know you were so deep.”

“Stuff it, Namjoon. I never fucking asked,” you say. Namjoon’s gotten absolutely unbearable, ever since his Head Boy friend graduated last year, leaving him to completely his own devices without anyone to keep him in check. You miss that Head Boy. He was nice.

“But your journal did. I mean, it was lying out in the open, far away from any person who displayed any signs of ownership. It was practically begging to be read.”

“You’re a goddamn piece of shit,” you spit, and he chuckles at your comeback. “Go shove a textbook up your ass.”

“Not a fan of people reading your writing, I get it,” Namjoon says, hands up in surrender as he begins to back away, the cheeky smile still drawn on his face. “I, for one, think you are an excellent writer, Y/N. You should let people read your stuff. They’d like it.”

“Not a chance.”

He walks away, leaving you breathless and boiling.

“He’s such a tool,” your friend says, hand rubbing your arm to calm you down. “That’s why I didn’t want him as my tutor. I couldn’t stand being around him.”

“I think Y/N needs some time to calm down. Look at her. She’s practically overheating.”

Your friend pulls your journal from where you’re clutching it to your chest, smiling awkwardly as she places it back down on the newspaper, pushing it over to where you sit so you can have a better eye on it.

You’re never dealing with this again.

You spend the rest of the night shuffling through the innumerable books in the library, desperate to find a spell that will prevent anyone besides you to fish through your personal, private journal. Anything to prevent the Namjoon Situation from ever happening again. God, what an asshole. Has he never heard of respect? Personal space?

Admittedly, doing this instead of your homework is a terrible move on your part, because not only are there no spells designed to resolve this type of predicament—which you find outrageous, especially because aren’t wizards supposed to come up with solutions to every problem? That’s why they have magic, obviously—your search takes up a good few hours hunting through the table of contents of each library book that piques your interest, and by the time it’s nearing curfew and you’ve collected a grand total of zero spells, all of your homework lays incomplete on your bed, begging to be finished. But you are determined, and the librarian is trying to shuffle the last scraggle of students out of the room so they don’t miss their curfew, so you merely pick up the pace.

You and the librarian are mutual friends at best, since she’s always helping you out with your journal and recommending her favorite wizard poets, but when she peeks her head down the aisle and sees you frantically shuffling through a dusty old thing, she hisses.

“Ms. Y/L/N! Do you know what time it is?”

And just as it so happens, that dusty old thing that your fingers speedily flip the pages of happens to have the one spell you think will work, a little scrawled piece of handwriting that sticks out like a sore thumb in comparison to the rest of the book’s printed text. At least someone tried.

“Can I take this, Professor?” You ask hurriedly as she walks over to you, a hand on your back as she gently shoves you towards the exit.

“Yes, sure, whatever,” she waves off your request, waiting until you’re outside the library before she brutally shuts the door in your face, but you couldn’t care less.

You’ve finally found what you’re looking for.

The door to your common room creaks closed, and then the curfew bells sound, echoing along the stone walls as you sigh a breath of relief, grateful you and Filch will not be meeting in the darkness of the empty hallways tonight. Most of the other students in your house are also lounging around in the main lobby of the common room, chatting amongst themselves or struggling to work in the quietest place they can find, which isn’t very quiet to begin with—Gryffindors, to put it nicely, don’t know how to shut the fuck up—anyway. You’re pleased about this, because this means you can go straight up to your dormitory without anyone bothering you, perform this slightly sketchy spell on your journal, and begin the daunting task of finishing all the homework you refrained from doing.

“Y/N!”

You whip your head to the source of the sound and see Namjoon waving you down, nursing a bottle of Felix Felicis in his hand, a telltale sign that you should avoid him tonight. If he’s awful when he’s sober, imagine how much of a nightmare he is drunk.

In hindsight, turning around was an abysmal idea, because now Namjoon knows you’ve acknowledged him, and he’s going to capitalize off of it.

You keep walking, pushing through the conglomerations of students and making for your dormitory, hoping he won’t try to engage you any further.

There’s a hand grabbing onto the sleeve of your robe, and you’d rather die than have another conversation with him, but you look at him regardless.

“Can I help you?” You ask, trying to make your voice sound as ticked off as possible.

“I wanted to apologize for earlier,” Namjoon says, and suddenly, you’re starting to like drunk Namjoon a lot better than sober Namjoon. “I didn’t know. My friend schooled me on it.”

“Cool, apology accepted,” you spit quickly, desperate to get his grubby fingers off of the edge of your sleeve and your body up to your bedroom, where your journal waits to be protected. “Leave me alone?” Even though it comes out as a question, it’s more of an order.

Namjoon is much easier to get rid of tonight than he normally is. He backs away from you, leaving you with a pleasantly friendly smile as he makes his way towards where he was chatting with his friends, letting you scurry up to your room in peace.

Once there, you grab your journal from where it was locked up in your trunk and place it on the floor in the middle of the dormitory, since you would like to avoid lighting yourself or your bed aflame should this spell go horribly wrong, thank you very much. Shuffling back to the page in the book with the scrawled little handwriting in faded quill ink, you hold out your wand tentatively. For some reason, your hands are shaking. The professors always told you never to perform spells not taught to you, and only use the ones from a trustworthy adult or a renowned book. Well, you’re already in your last year, so what’s the worst that could happen?

You know you have to get this spell over and done with, especially because you can’t have someone walking in and seeing you screeching unfamiliar magic at your inanimate journal, so you take a deep breath, focus all your energy on the journal, and read out the words written on the page, loud and clear. A burst of purple light flies out from the end of your want, hitting the journal square in the center of the cover. For a mere moment, the journal looks to be levitating, sparkles flickering around it, before it hits the floor with a thud, like nothing happened to it in the first place.

You shut the book in your hands, throwing it on your bed carelessly as you step towards the journal, hand stretched out to grab it but the rest of your body as far away from it as you can go, just in case you happen to electrocute yourself or something. That’d suck.

When your fingers finally gloss over the leather and nothing happens, you smile to yourself, pleased. Picking your journal up and making your way back to your bed, you quickly finger through the pages, and all of your poetry seems to be perfectly in tact.

One of the other girls that shares your dormitory traipses up the stairs, significantly worn out, and you rush towards her, journal in hand.

“Hey,” you say, catching her by surprise. “Could you open this for me?”

She doesn’t even question your request—no wonder why, people ask some strange favors in this school—and does what you ask, opening the journal with no effort as all. However, before you let yourself deflate in disappointment that the spell was simply a dud, you see that all of the pages before her are blank, your words erased entirely, like they were never written in the first place.

“Is that it?” She asks you, holding your notebook out in front of you.

You take it gladly, smiling to yourself. No more Nosy Namjoon, as far as you’re concerned. “Yes, thank you.”

Only the next day do you learn why teachers always told you never to use spells not taught to you properly. You’ve been spending the whole day boasting to your friends that you found a spell that makes your journal your journal, for your eyes only, letting them bubble with friend-anger and envy, anger at the fact that now they, truly, won’t be able to snoop through your journal (though it’s not like they were evil enough to be planning on doing that), and envy at the fact that you solved your issue with a single wave of your wand, easy as that.

You’re skipping around campus, very delighted with yourself and your superior problem-solving skills—that’s what being a witch is all about, right?—when you look around for a bit too long and make eye contact with the boy with platinum hair, the one that is incessantly present in your brain, seeing him sitting on a log in the courtyard, writing his homework, probably. He looks up at the same time that you look at him, and you stop in the middle of the hallway you’ve been happily gamboling down, and you stare at each other.

It’s actually not staring. It’s more like, gazing. You gaze at each other, and he doesn’t make a move and neither do you, but you’re finally meeting his eyes for the first time and even though he’s so far away it looks like he’s lived a lifetime—no, several—already, aged and wise and experienced. It looks like he has the secrets of the universe hiding out in his irises, his pupils, and he’s waiting to find someone to share them with.

You’re a bit more daring today, so you wave, cracking an awkward smile as you raise your hand, shaking it ever so slightly. A small, puny little smile grows on his, or maybe you’re just imagining it, but that’s all you see before you turn, skipping off to the library, where you have a feeling you know what your next poem is going to be on.

the universe. it is not in the sky where it should belong but rather it rests in the eyes of a boy who is too young, too innocent to have seen such a lifetime before him and every time he blinks he sees another story, another tragic end and he hopes that the next time he closes his eyes this story will be a happy ever after.

And now, the realization that you should usually always listen to your professors because they tend to know what’s best for you soon comes to fruition, because you’re about to close your journal, when you see handwriting that does not belong to you, scrawling itself on the bottom of the page where you wrote your poem about the boy.

nice poem

Excuse me?

[you] WHO ARE YOU

[stranger] WHO ARE YOU

[you] WHY ARE YOU IN MY JOURNAL

[stranger] WHY ARE YOU IN MINE

[you] ???? this is my journal???

[stranger] i believe this is my journal.

[you] i fuckin hate wizards.

[stranger] are you a muggle?

[you] no, i just hate us.

[stranger] relatable.

You’ve filled up nearly an entire new page, but you’re noticing your words fading as you write them, disappearing into thin air on the parchment in front of you, like invisible ink, but only backwards. Every word that pops up onto the page from whoever is on the other end of your weirdly transcendent journal disintegrates about ten seconds after you’ve read it, the speech literally sinking into the paper.

[you] how did you get into my journal?

[stranger] pretty sure this is still my journal.

[you] but i can see you writing.

[stranger] well, i can see yours.

[you] this makes no sense. how can you see my writing when you don’t have my journal?

[stranger] it’s not like i know.

[you] i literally cast a spell on my journal so people wouldn’t be able to read it.

[stranger] and how trustworthy is said spell?.

[you] …

[stranger] well, that explains that.

[you] are you judging me behind a goddamn journal cover?????????

[stranger] i’m not not judging you.

[you] can you read what else i’ve written?

[stranger] i can see your poems, if that’s what you’re asking.

For fucks sake. This is all totally against anything and everything you wanted from Sketchy Book Spell. You don’t know if the Namjoon incident is worse or better than this, a random stranger that you can’t even visualize, access to every single thing you’ve written down in your duration of Hogwarts attendance.

[stranger] can you see my stuff?

[you] you write?

[stranger] can’t you see it??

You flip backwards a couple of pages, and printed right where your poems used to reside are words that do not belong to you. It looks like poetry, when you see it from a first glance, artsy and cut off and short, but when you investigate a little further, it’s not poetry. It’s lyrics. The stranger writes lyrics, and holy shit, they are good.

give me some drinks, i want to get drunk today please don’t stop me anything will be fine alcohol is a luxury for a bum but i can’t stand it sober everyone else is running why am i the only one here

You suppose that in exchange for inadvertently sharing your entire life story in the form of verse, it would only make sense for the person on the other end to have their private lyrics revealed. Neither of you are getting much out of this, other than a nice, jovial chat.

[you] i can.

[stranger] guess it goes both ways then.

[you] yes, i guess it does.

[stranger] do you know how to fix this?.

[you] no, i found the spell that caused this in the first place in an old book.

[stranger] okay, but wouldn’t that book have the counterspell?

[you] no, someone wrote in the spell at the bottom of the page.

[stranger] didn’t your mother ever tell you not to use spells not put in print?

[you] i’m not very good at following rules.

[stranger] clearly.

[you] hey! it’s not like i WANTED this to happen.

[stranger] well, it happened.

[you] no shit sherlock.

[stranger] so can you fix this?

[you] i’ve never been very good at solving problems.

[stranger] ?

[you] that’s literally why i have a journal. because i can’t solve my problems.

[stranger] so you write about them instead?

[you] yes.

[stranger] i do that too.

[you] do you mind telling me why you write the lyrics you do?

[stranger] what goes on in my mind isn’t necessarily stuff other people want to hear.

[you] i have the opposite problem. everyone wants to see what i put in this thing.

[stranger] and that’s why you cast that spell?

[you] precisely.

[stranger] well, no one else can see it except me.

[you] i don’t know if i prefer that.

[stranger] you’ve read my lyrics. i won’t judge you.

[you] i won’t judge you, either.

[stranger] do you trust me?

[you] i’m not sure.

[stranger] i trust you.

It’s not like you can get any more personal with whoever is on the other end of your messaging journals.

[you] i guess i trust you too.

[stranger] i’m suga.

[you] i’m Y/N.

[suga] nice to meet you, Y/N.

[you] nice to meet you too, suga.

And for some strange reason, as you sit in the quietest corner of the Gryffindor common room, scribbling away on your journal, wasting ink as you watch it disappear on the page before you, you feel like whoever this Suga person may be, you are comfortable with them. It’s as if you were meant to share your writing with them all along.

Keeping the majority of your identities offers some sort of security blanket between the two of you, a safe haven, where neither of you have to specifically worry about the other finding out who you are, or where you are, or why it was you who chose to write in your respective journals. When Suga doesn’t know who you are, and you don’t know who they are, it’s easier, because you feel like you can say anything without worrying about repercussions.

[suga] i never asked you,

[you] hmm?

[suga] are you a she?

[you] do i seem like a she?

[suga] your words definitely read like one, not to be gender stereotypical. i don’t mind if you’re a he, or a they, for that matter.

[you] you read well.

[suga] so i’m right? you’re a she?

[you] got it.

[suga] i’m a he. in case you wanted to know.

[you] i didn’t, but thank you for telling me.

[suga] i’ll tell you anything you want to know.

You’ve refrained from informing your friends that the reason you’ve been so engaged with your journal recently is because there is a mystery man on the other end, responding to you like he’s know you his whole life. You don’t really think they need to know this.

What your friends have noticed is your particular affinity for trying to sneak glances at a certain boy, because they know you and they watch you look around each room you enter, like you’re searching for someone. You’re not exactly very good at being discreet, especially when it comes to the boy with the platinum hair and hazy smile.

“Hello? Earth to Y/N?” A hand waves in front of your face, snapping you out of your mindless trance. When you look down, the inked quill in your hand has drawn a squiggly line all across one of the blank pages of your journal, but this time, it vanishes.

“What?”

“Were you looking at someone?” Your friend asks, an eyebrow raised in something that looks like curiosity and excitement.

“I think so!” Another chimes in. “I think it was him.” She points towards the boy, who’s currently sitting quietly, a quill pointing towards his textbook. He’s surrounded by other boys, all from different houses, and they’re chatting away, tossing bits of food at each other.

“Jungkook? Isn’t he the commentator?”

“No, not him, the Slytherin boy.”

“Yoongi?”

Yoongi. The boy finally has a name. You glance up at the mention of his name, smiling to yourself as you think about him. There is something that makes him stick, something about him that keeps him afloat in your mind, refusing to sink.

“Aha!” One of your friends shriek, making some of the younger students in the Great Hall look towards you, trying to find the source of the exclamation. “You do like him, don’t you?”

Your cheeks heat up furiously, and you scowl, bested by your friends. “No comment.”

“I knew it!”

No point in trying to dig yourself out now. The only thing that you can do is prevent yourself from getting buried any further. “I’ve never even spoken to him before.”

“That’s ridiculous,” your friend says, at the same time another one speaks, saying, “That’s understandable.”

“Why?”

“He’s a quiet kid. He’s in our year, but I never notice him anywhere. He’s always writing something down—doing homework, probably—he’s got fantastic grades—or sitting amongst his friends, that rowdy group of boys from all different years and houses,” your friend explains, and suddenly it all makes sense, why you never see him. It looks to you like he doesn’t want to be seen for whatever reason he may have.

“Trust you to have a crush on him,” your other friend jokes, nudging you with her shoulder as she smirks.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You act exactly like him,” your friend spells it out for you. “You’re quiet unless you’re with friends, and you’re always writing shit down in that spell-ridden journal of yours.”

“Don’t bring my journal into this,” you say, hugging the book to your chest tightly, like a security guard.

“All I’m saying is that you should go talk to him.”

Like that’s going to happen.

[you] how old are you?

[suga] eighteen. you?

[you] 17.

[suga] you write well for a seventeen-year-old.

[you] you write well for an eighteen-year old.

[suga] do i, now?

[you] i don’t know what it is, but you write like you’ve already lived a life, and you’re looking back on it.

[suga] like a sad old person?

[you] yes.

[suga] -_-

[you] i’m kidding! you just seem sage. mature mind for an immature body.

[suga] that’s one way to put it. who’s the boy you keep writing about?

You were going to get there eventually. Yoongi, whoever he is, has become somewhat of a recurring character in your poems, the same platinum boy who keeps making a comeback in your writing as he slowly overtakes each crevice in your brain.

[you] just some boy.

[suga] doesn’t seem like ‘just some boy’ to me.

[you] my friends think i have a crush on him. how juvenile.

[suga] do you?

[you] not you too!

[suga] i just wanted to know! it doesn’t seem like you do. it just seems like you’re interested in who he is.

[you] at least you’re not as persistent as they are.

[suga] your poems don’t exactly scream ‘unrequited love with fellow schoolboy’ to me, if it’s any consolation.

[you] at least you’re on my side.

[suga] you haven’t given me a reason not to be.

[you] i don’t know how i feel about him. he just won’t get out of my head.

[suga] in a bad way or a good way?

[you] both? neither? god, i don’t know.

[suga] judging by your poetry about said boy, it must be in a good way. you don’t really write about boys and universes if you’re thinking that they’re a piece of shit.

[you] yes you can! what if i had written something like ‘i wish the universe eats you up so i don’t have to see you again’? that’s not very positive.

[suga] haha i guess you can, then.

[you] i mean, you’re right, i’m not bothered in the slightest with his presence in my head. it’s quite comforting, actually.

[suga] let me guess, you’ve never talked to him?

[you] HOW CAN YOU TELL?

[suga] not hard to. if you had spoken to him, you would’ve written something else, something about his voice. maybe his lips.

[you] what are you, some sort of psychoanalytical journal whisperer?

[suga] shit, you’ve revealed my true identity. i hide out in worn leather journals so innocent, unsuspecting schoolgirls like yourself can come chat to me, then i take their souls and make myself immortal by consuming them.

[you] creep.

[suga] haha. listen, i don’t really know who this boy is, but i, for one, think he’d be lucky to chat to someone like you.

[you] you do?

[suga] you’re witty, sarcastic, well-spoken. i don’t see why any boy would turn down a conversation with you.

[you] thanks, suga.

[suga] hey, i might be a serial killer whose primary method of soul-extraction is via journal, but i’m always here to help.

And alright, so maybe you’ve never met Suga before, but revealing all of your concerns with your crush-not-crush on Yoongi to him doesn’t seem like the worst idea in the world. In fact, you just might take Suga up on his advice. He seems to know what he’s talking about.

Your subsequent interaction with Yoongi happens the day after Suga told you to actually talk to him, and he’ll be very pleased to know you do just that. Your friends were right—he is always writing something down, even as he’s lying flat on the lawn of the courtyard, textbooks and scrolls of parchment decorating the area around his strewn-out hair, inkwells and used quills among the mix. He looks, for one thing, irrevocably photogenic, and a little bubble of envy pops in your brain. How dare he always look good. That is Not Allowed.

You tentatively approach him, journal resting in your hand by your side, almost blending into your black robes if it weren’t for the difference in the fabric. He’s craning his neck as he writes something down, in some sort of notebook, as he occasionally glances to the side, stretching to see the tiny little font in the textbook to his left. It looks like the most uncomfortable position you could ever somehow warp your body into, but for some reason, he looks perfectly fine.

“Hello.”

Yoongi shoots up, quickly shutting his notebook as he turns to you, eyes blown impossibly wide. Clearly, he’s not used to people talking to him.

“Hi,” he says, short and sweet.

“I’m Y/N.”

“I know.”

It makes absolute sense that he would know who you are, but not you him. It just seems so cliche, how you’ve hardly noticed him throughout your schooling but he’s already seen you in the hallways, his classes, a name easily put to the face.

“Oh, of course you do,” you say awkwardly, chuckling to yourself as you fiddle with the journal in your hands, switching it between your left and your right so you don’t look stiff as a statue.

“Can I, uh, help you?” Yoongi asks. His voice is a little rough, but still smooth, like ice cream with cookie bits crushed into it.

“Me? No, I just wanted to say hello, you know. Get to know you,” you reply, your hand gestures wildly out of control. It seems that you can’t keep still in front of him, fidgeting and squirming like an impatient child, desperate for some sugar.

“Oh,” Yoongi says, hands behind him, propping his body up. “Well, I’m Yoongi.”

“I know.”

Yoongi grins to himself. “Glad we’re on a first-name basis, then, Y/N.” He motions to the journal getting tossed back and forth between your hands, an eyebrow raised in curiosity.

“This? Oh, um, just homework. You have one too, don’t you?” You say, desperately trying to get the conversation off of your journal. You don’t really want to discuss it with him, especially not when there are poems inside of it about him.

He looks to where you’re pointing, the black book beside him, and he chuckles awkwardly, a forced laugh. “Guess we got one thing in common, then.”

“I’m sure we have more in common than that,” you insist.

Yoongi begins to gather up all of his belongings, shoving them into one uneven pile, quills and parchment alike, holding it with both of his hands, his little black book sitting neatly on top. He looks at you, grinning a smile that’s gummy and sweet. “I guess we’ll have to find out about that, won’t we, Y/N?”

With the last word tucked under his tongue, he’s off, walking in the opposite direction from where he was facing you, leaving you embarrassingly breathless in the middle of the courtyard.

That night, when you open up your journal to write down your thoughts of the day, you see that Suga has already beaten you to it, claiming a fresh page for a new batch of lyrics, as beautifully wistful as always.

the awkwardness was only for a moment, i touched you again even though i was gone for a long time without repulsion, you accepted me without you there’s nothing after the dawn, two of us we welcomed the morning together don’t let go of my hand forever, i won’t let go of you again either

You decide to add to the mix, letting the words leave your brain and engrave themselves on the page before you, soft and gentle.

his grin he may have the universe written amongst his eyes but his grin oh, his grin it has hell and heaven all across the outline of his lips. it’s lopsided, like he knows something i don’t, and of course he does, after all, there are nebulas in his irises, comets on the inside of his eyelids, a galaxy painted across his vision, and i see stars.

It’s only a matter of time before Suga opens his journal to see your addition to the mix, sappy words of love, making the both of you terribly hopeless, terribly romantic.

[suga] i take it you spoke to him?

[you] what gave it away?

[suga] all the universe references. i feel like i’m reading a young adult romance novel.

[you] you sort of are, aren’t you?

[suga] it’s a very well-written young adult romance novel. lots of verse, little prose. i’m not good with prose.

[you] is that why you’re a lyricist?

[suga] one of the reasons.

[you] why else?

[suga] to hide behind my words.

[you] hmm?

[suga] i’m a new person when i’m writing. i’ve created an identity for myself.

[you] am i currently speaking with this identity?

[suga] you are.

[you] you’re fascinating.

[suga] that’s the last word you’d use to describe me if you knew who i really was.

[you] i already find it fascinating that you, whoever you decide ‘you’ is, have channeled such emotion into your lyrics that you’ve shaped a new persona out of it. that takes true dedication.

[suga] it’s more of an escape, actually.

[you] tomayto tomahto.

[suga] did you realize halfway through writing that that you couldn’t necessarily emphasize the different enunciations via written text?

[you] maybe.

[suga] you’re fascinating, also. how’s the boy?

[you] don’t tell my friends, but i think they’re right.

[suga] i kind of already figured they were.

[you] hey!

[suga] it’s not hard to tell. only a person in love would start comparing their lover’s body parts to falling meteors.

[you] did my poem scream ‘unrequited love on fellow schoolboy’ to you? well, what do you suppose said person in love should do about it, love expert?

[suga] love expert, huh?

[you] you seem to know what you’re talking about. ever dated someone, suga?

[suga] can’t say i have, but i could offer you some words of wisdom.

[you] fire away.

[suga] do your best.

[you] my best?

[suga] i can’t imagine why this boy wouldn’t want to talk to you. there’s no reason why he would avoid you.

[you] isn’t there?

[suga] no. there isn’t.

With great practice, your conversations with Yoongi slowly transition from awkward, empty small talk to mindless chatter you don’t mind listening to, not when you find yourself lost in the haze of his voice as it settles around you, invading your senses. Listening to him speak is like listening to the white noise in The Three Broomsticks, soothing and peaceful. It is so difficult not to drown in the sound.

“How long have you known about me?” You ask him one day as you’re secretly camping out in the Slytherin common room, completely immune to the confused and snarky looks the other Slytherins are sending your way, you, a Gryffindor with that obnoxious red collar of yours.

Yoongi tilts his head back on the edge of the couch, revealing that beautifully smooth neckline that you want to do things to, but you won’t mention that. “Since first year, I suppose. I remember your name.” He looks at you, a cheeky smile on his face. “You didn’t remember me, though.”

“Hey! You were a quiet kid,” you defend yourself.

Yoongi chuckles heartily at your indignation.

Perhaps this is crossing the line, but every marker has been blurred over the past few weeks that you’ve been talking, the border between you two nothing more than fuzz, so you reach over, twirling a bit of his platinum bangs in between your fingers. “When’d you do your hair?”

“This summer. Can’t you see my roots?” He asks, tipping his head forward to reveal the most beautiful blend of ivy black and lightning blonde atop his head.

“It looks good.”

“I need to dye my hair again,” Yoongi huffs. “What color should I do?”

“Green? Like your robes?” You suggest jokingly, and he scrunches his nose up at the thought of him, with bright green locks.

“Maybe not. How about pink, like yours?” He contemplates.

“My robes aren’t pink.”

“Close enough.”

“You’d match all the Gryffindors,” you remind him.

He shakes his head. “No, I’d just want to match you.” When you look at him, his cheeks are tinted the same shade of pink you’d imagine would decorate his hair, a soft rose color that makes him glow in the morning, afternoon, and evening.

[you] is suga the only identity you’ll allow me the pleasure of meeting?

[suga] i wouldn’t exactly call it pleasure.

[you] i find it pleasurable. you’re wonderful to talk to.

[suga] i feel like you’ve become too trustworthy of me.

[you] maybe you’re right. i mean, i haven’t heard of many pedophiles who write crushing lyrics about loneliness and the loss of youth, but you never know. you could be a serial killer.

[suga] and you’re making jokes about it?

[you] you’re not a serial killer, suga, though it would be nice to know who the person holding the quill is.

[suga] i’m not so sure you’d like to know.

[you] what’s not to like?

[suga] most things.

[you] you say you’ve created an identity for yourself, but i highly doubt that identity varies much from who you really are. we don’t have to meet or anything. i’d just like to know who you are.

[suga] i feel like meeting is the only way we could do this.

[you] i’m in school, i can’t just up and leave. i don’t even know where you are.

[suga] i’m in school, too.

[you] are you, now? where?

[suga] i don’t imagine i make it difficult to guess.

[you] let’s see. you write in english, which could mean nothing considering lots of foreign schools are teaching english anyway, but you write lyrics in english, which means you have a greater understanding of the language, so you’re a native speaker. this could put you in america, england, or australia, for the most part. if you said you were in school as any sort of consolation, then that means us meeting isn’t at all implausible, which places you in england, at hogwarts. and judging by that, you definitely know who i am.

[suga] who’s the sherlock now?

You wish you could say it would surprise you that you’ve narrowed it down so well, and that the very person you’ve been messaging via journal has known you this entire time, but it doesn’t. And in the dusty crevices of your brain, there lies a sneaking suspicion as to who you’ve been speaking to, and it both excites and terrifies you.

[you] where do you want to meet, fellow hogwarts student?

[suga] the courtyard?

Suspicion confirmed. Guess you are quite the Sherlock, after all.

When you turn the corner of the hallway and the courtyard comes into view, a certain platinum-haired boy with unruly roots and a lopsided smile catches your eye as he sits on the ledge of the wall, foot tapping on the ground to some imaginary song, probably one of his own. You walk up to him happily, your arms swinging by your side, the journal resting in your hands.

He sees you, too, and he stands up when you near him, mouth open to offer some sort of explanation, but you beat him to it.

“Suga, huh?” You say somewhat loudly, your voice unwavering, filled to the brim with confidence.

Yoongi’s eyes widen, the same look he had on his face when you approached him but a few weeks prior. “You knew?”

“Not until yesterday,” you admit. “But I had a feeling.”

“What gave it away?”

You grin. “I hate to break it to you, Yoongi, but you and Suga speak the same way, an aura of concern and disregard lacing your words. If you were trying to run from the police by hiding under a different name, you’d be absolute shit at it.”

“Wow, thanks for telling me that,” Yoongi says, chuckling. “I guess I better work on my soul-sucking tactics.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Can I—can I see that, for a second?” Yoongi asks, motioning to the journal in your hands.

You hold it out for him, and when he takes it from you and opens it up to compare it with his, sure enough, your messages, poems, and lyrics cover the pages of both of your journals, the scrawl completely mirrored. He gives it back to you almost instantly, shoving it into your outstretched hands as he fumbles in the pockets of his robes, pulling out a quill with a bit of dry ink on the end. Quickly, he flips his journal open to a clean page, untouched by the both of you, and wets the end of his quill with his tongue. When you look down at that exact same page, you watch him draw on one page, curving the line to reveal half of a heart, split right down the middle where the books are bound.

“May I?” You ask in response, and he lets you grab hold of the quill in his hand. You look down, finishing the heart out on the opposite page, and the both of you look down at your respective journals, watching the ink fizzle into the journal like it was never there in the first place.

“Good to know we’re both on the same page,” Yoongi jokes, shooting his beautifully gummy smile your way, making your cheeks heat up at the sight.

You shut your journal and hold out your hand, a symbol of peace, friendship, romance, or all of the above. He takes it gladly. “Haven’t we always been?”

When you go back to your dormitory that night, you open up your journal to find a message from your one and only, written in the same spot where that heart once was.

[yoongi] i love you.

[you] i love you, too.

⇒ leave any feedback/requests here and check out my masterlist here!

#bangtanwriters-net #kwriterskollection #yoongi fluff #bts fluff #bts scenarios #yoongi scenarios #bts hogwarts #bts hogwarts au #bts imagines #yoongi imagines #suga imagines #suga fluff #w: interconnection #w: sorted #thiS WAS SUCH A BEAST AND I RUSHED TO FINISH IT SO IT'S A LIL SHAKY #but i think she turned out pretty not terribly #i am so tired. it's nearly midnight here. and im crying

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the-erickson-labrynthian · 7 years ago

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Redo Writing Commissions!

(This is just a copy paste of my other post so I could get people who might be new interested in what I wanna do. Sorry if that seems spam-y, its hard to get all your posts seen around here. Anyways, thanks for reading!)

Commissions:

I’m starting commissions, yay! Before I go over specifics, a few guidelines:

1) I Reserve the right to refuse any commission. I won’t say there’s anything I wouldn’t do without hearing what you want, but I will not do anything that I decide would make me uncomfortable, but, as an understanding person, I’ll hear your reasoning out.

2) All of these prices are subject to change if I feel they could change. Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to update this if that becomes the case.

3) I only accept Paypal, unless you’d wanna walk to my house and hand me money, but the catch is, I ain’t telling you where I live. Contact me at [email protected]

4) Depending on length, these things will take time, but they will be top priority, but I have school, so be kind in your patience.

5) If I go over any limits for my prices on my own by accident, that is on me, not on you. All surplus I add is freeeeeeeeeee.

Types of things I’ll write:

Narratives: Any sort of basic storytelling you need, fiction, non-fiction, sci-fi, you name it, as long as it is in prose format. My Excerpts series is a good example of these. I set this at $1 per 250 words

Letters/Journals: A specific kind of writing, a letter to another person, or a journal, any writing that is pertained to a specific person. I will need information on whatever character you want, or at least a name to work with. My Excerpt series also has examples of these. This price is also $1 per 250 words.

Poetry: I’ll be honest, I don’t enjoy writing poetry very much, not because I am bad at it, but because it’s a lot of work for little reward, for me personally. Due to the nature of the work, I charge minimum $2 for any poem length under 5 four to five lined stanzas, $4 for anything greater than those five stanzas. If your poem does not follow a format that makes this pricing easy, such as stand alone lines, we can determine a case by case price. Prose poetry I count as Narrative and charge that price.

Character Descriptions: I can design characters for you, if you’d like, from a purely written perspective, I can do it. If you give me a personality, I’ll write a bio from it. If you give me a description, I’ll do the reverse and write a paragraph about how I think they’d act. I set these at $2, and the maximum words at 500, which is plenty, believe me.

Scripts: I will write scripts between 2+ characters, sort of how a screenplay is written, a mostly dialogue focused writing with vague description parts where you or I deem necessary. Dialogue is the center of this, I would pick this category if you want dialogue specific stuff. I charge $1 per 250 words, but if your characters exceed 3, $2 per 250, mostly because I need to keep track of several different voices and personalities, which takes work.

Personal Writing: Two types:

A: If there’s anything of my opinions or my voice specifically you want me to do, I will do it. Want me to write a 500 word rant on how pencils are ruining America? Sure. I have a lot of very strong opinions, and I could make a rant on just about anything (I have plenty of friends who can attest, none on Tumblr though… but that’s besides the point.) This will be the same price as Narratives, $1 per 250 words.

B: If you want me to write any specific prompt with any of my own characters, price will depend on the category above you pick, this is only here to let you know I am willing to write “Fanfiction” of my own work, like a letter to a character, and so on.

Review your work: If you’d like, I can personally review, or on Tumblr review (Based on what you want) some of your writing. I will give my thoughts, and feedback. This takes some time, with a combination of reading and giving feedback, so I set it at $3 per 500 words of your work, my average review amount will be around 250 words, give or take.some, but will increase depending on the size of the material. Trust me, I’ll be sure to give detail.

Other: Anything I can’t think of that doesn’t fit and above category. Based on what it is, how much time it would take, and my overall interest, we will negotiate a price.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or need any clarifications. Thank you for reading!

- Erickson.

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turningpagebooks · 7 years ago

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ARC REVIEW: “Planting Gardens in Graves” by R.H. Sin

Title: Planting Gardens In Graves Author: R.H. Sin Genre: Poetry Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing Publication Date: February 6th, 2018 Format: eARC Source: Publisher Page count: 272 (paperback edition)

Plot summary: This is collection of poetry that hones in on the themes dearest to R.H. Sin's readers. This original volume celebrates connection, mourns heartbreak, and above all, empowers its readers to seek the love they deserve.

Planting Gardens In Graves on Goodreads | Chapters Indigo | Amazon CA -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I received this eARC from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. It's available in stores and online February 6th!

Planting Gardens In Graves is .

Please note this poetry collection may be triggering. It mentions self-harm.

I've been in the mood for poetry lately. I follow poets on Instagram, and find so many new to me writers that I love. I found R.H. Sin on Instagram and liked some of the poems he shares on there. So of course when I saw this on Netgalley, I wanted to read it. Unfortunately, I was left feeling incredibly disappointed.

What first struck me about this collection is that often the way the stanzas are broken up are jarring. It interrupted the flow of them, but not in a way that came across as meaningful to me.

I also found that the language R.H. Sin uses sometimes was offputting. The imagery he created with some crude words and phrases came across as ugly. The topics he was discussing were ugly, but to see some of the same rude words again and again in his poems was frankly disturbing.

He covers topics from love, sexism, grief, and depression. I liked only a few of the poems. Reminders For Men, To Serve and Protect, We Do Not, and Either Way are some of the ones that stood out to me. I felt the messages in those poems were conveyed well and covered important topics. There's one where Sin tells men to stop judging women, and to stop expecting things from women because women owe men nothing. There's also one about racist cops.

My issue, however, is that this collection is pitched as including peoms which "empowers its readers to seek the love they deserve". This makes me mad. A lot of the poems about finding the love you deserve seem to be directed at women. In fact, there are numerous poems which seem to judge and advise women about how to handle abusive or toxic relationships. I cannot tell you how angry it made me. One poem is about a girl whose mom was abused by her dad. The poem ends by saying that the girl is just like her mother. What a cold way to talk about abuse. The other poems about abuse urge the women to leave the men who abuse them. There's so much wrong with that statement because women often stay out of fear or begin to think they deserve the abuse, etc.

Another poem gives advice about what daughters should be taught by their mothers. I repeat: this poem tells readers that daughters need to be taught the games men will play to get what they want so they know how to guard themselves. 1) Girls are constantly told what men will say and do to get in their pants. We don't need a man advising us to learn something we've already been taught. 2) Why wasn't the poem about sons being told to treat girls with respect? By this point, I lost my patience for the book. Sin directs many of his poems about sexism towards women like it's our job to guard ourselves rather than men's job to stop their problematic behaviour. It seems like the author chose to discuss sexism to show how woke he is. He's attempted to give women's issues a voice since he has a large audience. But if this is the kind of thing he's going to be saying to his audience, I'd prefer the book didn't include poems about that topic at all. If you want to read good poetry about sexism and feminism, go read books by the many talented female poets. I personally will never recommend this book.

Planting Gardens In Graves is a disappointing book. It boasts that it's empowering, but I'm here to tell you it isn't. I was a fan of his work from Instagram, but after reading this book I'm left feeling sad. The bad aspects of this poetry collection outweigh the good ones. And overall, its take on sexism is problematic.

#personal #turningpagebooks #arc review #planting gardens in graves #r.h. sin #poetry #netgalley #review #book review #book reviews #novel review #novel reviews #books #book #novels #novel #reading #read #1 star

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lit--bitch · 5 years ago

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‘Hello’ by Crispin Best (2019)

(Disclosure, again: I don’t know Crispin Best, I know I’m “friends with him” on Facebook, but it’s one of those things where random poets/writers/artists add each other on social media platforms and there’s like a weird community in it but we still don’t actually speak to each other? That, basically. Hello is published by Partus Press, which is run by Vala Thorodds and Luke Allan. I don’t know either of them. They specialise in publishing Icelandic and international literature. Hello is a gorgeous book, the cover is like a pastel colour rainbow, I feel like it should taste of marshmallows. The paper is rich, the spine is strong af, it’s just a lovely, satisfying book. Also Partus Press’s website is incredibly pleasing to surf, it’s really slick, their interface is smooth. Buying books on there feels as good as having one of them in your hands. End of suck-up.)

I have known and loved Crispin Best’s writing since I picked up his pamphlet from Faber New Poets, which my friend Lenni Sanders recommended to me. There was this one line I read and I just fell in love:

‘I wish for you the perfect banana.’

It’s from Crispin’s poem, ‘is it still brunch if i am alone’, and of course it features in Hello. Every time I read it, I get such a great big smile on my face. Because there really is nothing more universally understood than the perfect banana, whatever the perfect banana is to you. (Side note: I like it when the banana’s skin starts to really freckle and yellow up). And images like these are totally emblematic of Crispin Best’s writing, because he has a gift for expressing feelings, in all their variations, within absurd, perfect metaphors that still somehow makes sense.

I mean this in poems like the very first in Hello’s collection, which incidentally is called, ‘Hello’. He writes, ‘i know that i’m here for the moment / that the pickles hit the plate / i’m here for good and to pair your socks / by windowlight’, it’s just so loving, so adoring, so doting. There is nothing more immediate and in-the-moment than pickles hitting the surface of a plate and yet it’s so random. I’m amazed by the assemblage of images in this collection, how the ordinary is so cleverly personified.

Hello sets out to beautify the triteness of our day-to-day, to kiss the things we sometimes ignore, like the word ‘fireplace’ (p. 42), or how the wind brings your clothes to life (p. 29). It is totally modest in its appreciation of everything, and experiences just about everything as having impact. It is funny, it is sad, it is grateful. It is a kind book.

There is an inherent “now-ness” in Hello. As I read each poem, I felt like I was in there, in every room, looking at every landscape, looking over the ‘I’s’ shoulder. It’s synonymous in the form that the poetry takes.

A lot of Crispin’s work is rooted in Internet culture, and this is plain as day in Hello, you can see how the Internet permeates through into the language and formatting of the writing. Most of the poems read like you would if you were receiving texts from somebody. Grammatical rules are thrown out the window, capitalisation is minimal. For many of us, when we’re texting, we’re not adhering to the rules of language, y’know, we’re not punctuating every sentence with proper full stops, or commas. This is evident in ‘what do i know’:

i love it when poems are dead and the light creeps under the door and not too far away something important is about to be crushed by that beautiful truck

There is a tightness to the work, which restricts where we look across the page. This technique, I think, recreates the action of the infinite scroll. We scroll down with our eyes, like we do with our thumbs, or fingers. Even the line-breaks mimic the dimensions of a phone screen, that rectangulation. It’s rare that sentences ever exceed half the length of this A5 book’s pages.

Sometimes I think this SMS-written style in Crispin’s poetry intimates other characteristics of texting-culture. A lot his poems are a mish-mash of images and thoughts which are relative to the sometimes anomalous-ness of texting correspondence. Not every conversation we have with someone over text starts with hello, nor ends with goodbye, and a lot of the time, conversations are staggered by minutes, hours, even days. If you were to visually recreate this in real-time, it’d be the equivalent of somebody saying something to you, standing there for 5 hours or however long you don’t speak for, and then finally responding. It’s such an absurdity that Crispin contains within these non-sequitur images: ‘if you can’t do the crime / don’t do the crime / and don’t thank me for the birthday wishes / please / just let me grow my beans’ (from ‘don’t call it a dream’). It’s hilarious—I can’t always understand why one sentence follows its predecessor in the way it does—this is absolutely intentional, though it might not be for the reasons I’ve interpreted. These non-sequiturs mirror the jagged, staggered incontinuity of how we sometimes interact online. And whilst they can distort and confuse the readability of the poetry, these non-sequiturs are a cornerstone to the collection’s confessionalism. In masking oneself behind these blurted, odd utterances, the ‘I’s awkward disposition is revealed. It promises to open up, slowly, someday. And it makes these promises in wonderful, subtle ways. Like ‘poem at the dinner table’:

here is the thing: the real reason i don’t let people get close to me is this faux denim shirt i’m scared that they will be able to tell [...] here is the thing: there are even tiny movements of your fingers that i don’t completely understand [...] here is the thing: between the boiler’s ticks i hear you whisper that you had a hunch about the shirt from this great distance i make my arms the perfect length

The realism in this poem really makes me smile. In just simple fragments, the ‘I’ says so much in a short, modest description. I understand the scene, simply denoted by the title, ‘poem at the dinner table’. The great thing about this stanza is how it’s prefaced by such seriousness: ‘here is the thing / the real reason i don’t let people / get close to me’. You’re misled into thinking that a sincere confession will follow, and it does, but not quite in the way you thought: ‘/ is this faux denim shirt’. The faux denim shirt—an analogy for the object of his insecurity in looking worth more than he actually is. The subversion is funny, but it equally intimates the personage’s insecurity about expressing what he really means, how he really feels, his shyness. By the end of the poem you find that the ‘I’ has acquainted himself with someone who understands, someone who helps him feel his wholeness again, and he jumps the distance. All of this is at the dinner table. And it’s in the spirit of the vernacular that Crispin Best does what he does, best, which is to take the ordinary and load it with meaningful subtexts, implying something much deeper is going on.

I was going to talk about ‘centralia’ last, because it’s my fav poem in the book. But there’s something about the structure of ‘centralia’ which intersects my previous point regarding the value in the ordinary.

‘centralia’ feels more like a section of the collection, rather than a poem. It’s 20 pages long and yet it’s only 405 words... I think. Might be a couple more or less. I was sad enough to count (but I’m shit at counting). How does a 405-word poem last 20 pages? Well, ‘centralia’ is made up of ellipsis which to me have a dualistic function in this poem: firstly they recreate the action of texting in real-time. You know when somebody’s texting you back and that little bubble comes up with three dots? The ‘...’? It’s kind of like that, except that there’s a superfluous amount of ellipsis which take up the whole space of the page, and they’re structured in such a way to form shapes and undulating curves bound by short quips of writing. The function of ellipsis is to omit words, sentences or whole paragraphs from a text without compromising the overall meaning. They can indicate unfinished thoughts or pauses. In ‘centralia’ they illustrate the series of written images which roll on from each other almost act like random, yet successive thoughts. But the ellipsis here doesn’t just precede the literary antecedent, it also succeeds it. The effect slows down the writing, and I read this piece very, very, slowly, as if to consider the ellipsis and the writing as inextricably bound, that the dots were were words in and of themselves. ‘centralia’ boasts some of my favourite lines in the work, like:

‘....today we’re going to talk about.......... / / / ........ how it feels to be ......... / / / / / / ...........how even a low moon....................... / / / can paint a bridge on a lake...........’

‘........picture a passion fruit........ / / / ..........why is it called that name... / / / ..............my only kink................ / is having my clothes blown off.......... / ...........by a leaf blower.............’

and,

‘..........i like things like...... / / ........how fast you climb the stairs.............. / / / like how werewolves............ / ..............don’t kill people................ / / / / / / .........full moons do............ / / / / / / / ............ like how ............. / / ........... you can just....... / / .............wear a pair................. / ............of trousers................ / / / ..........and people will assume............... / / .................they are................ / / / / .......................your trousers.......’

Obviously the way I’ve typed these particular parts out doesn’t do the format justice (you’ll have to buy the book to properly get a look) but I wonder if other people find themselves reading the text slowly as a consequence of this form.

‘centralia’ makes such beautiful and original observations about the things in which we take for granted, or things we don’t necessarily think twice about. It unpicks clichés, employs humour, it thinks laterally, by this I mean lines like ‘what if cum is ghosts’ ... 'centralia’ is like a whole collection within itself. It also makes for great Twitter material. It comes back to appreciating the immediacy of things around you besides what flags up on a phone screen, and that’s inherent in the way Crispin speaks to ‘you’. You just have to stop and enjoy the writing, in the same way you ought to stop and enjoy the world around you, as fleeting as it is:

(from nature poem) we’re here realise that at every moment you’re the only visible part of an almost infinite conga line ok now imagine crying while wearing cargo shorts it’s hard to do tonight we share a rocking chair toothpaste this blue-orange night sky

And you can’t help but feel as if you’re being directly addressed as a reader in the work, even though some poems are defined by their context; it’s clear some are break-up poems, lamentations on loss, or to Barack Obama. In some pieces, it seems like Hello is imploring us (the readers) to see reason, and catch up with ourselves, to contemplate the tangibility of what’s around us and remove ourselves from the artificialities of the virtual. I feel like this is evident in other poems like ‘🐬 but do dolphins want to swim with me ’ (the dolphin emoji in the book actually faces the other way and is a black silhouette).

the cooking apples / have long gone brown / on the countertop / nights arrive like iguanas in suits / and with them the long dream / on a beach / where a pop-up notification / blocks the sunset / these poems are the kiddie pools / i inflate while i’m alive

We’re confronted by these sorts of messages about social media all the time, like “take a break from your phone”, and it’s sort of an overdone cliché now, like the way people talk about bubble baths and retail therapy as ‘self-care’. Crispin approaches these clichés in his work but he does it in an unexpected, refreshing way, like imagine if a pop-up notification actually blocked the sunset. Again, it’s like, ‘put down the fucking phone, stop letting it get in the way of other things, stop letting myself get in the way of things taking their natural course’. This piece is a case for living without the reminder of one’s phone, a dissuasion of our present-day lifestyle gripped by the constant need to notified by blue-light disturbances. It asserts that is what is most healthy to us is the stuff we can physically touch. Tangibility is our final currency over which nobody else has any jurisdiction. Some things are more tangible and real and specific than others, and it’s up to us to choose and define that for ourselves.

Hello reminds me a lot of an ex I had a while ago. He didn’t have a lot of things, but he did hoard a lot of weird, random stuff, y’know like actual rubbish that needed to go in the bin, biscuit wrappers for example. When I stopped to observe why he kept these things, it seemed to me that it was because he’d glean more from a memory in a biscuit wrapper, than he might from a photograph of a loved one. He was invested in this vernacular trash we share together as human beings, rather than the typical artefacts we traditionally use to create memories, i.e. photo albums, or personal diaries. For him, it was like there was something much more profound, intimate, and vivid in sharing a packet of hobnobs together, than say taking a selfie at a pub. I feel like that’s something Crispin Best also shares in common with his “ode” in ‘io’: o tub girl in the rain / o modern american poetry / [...] / o fisher price / o fiddlesticks / [...] / o curly wurly wrapper / o nokia 3210 / o crepitating autumn leaf / o mars bar ice cream in september and the rain’. We can take comfort in these things, because they do, in a way, bring more order to our confusing truths, to the bewilderment of ourselves. We can confide in them and nourish ourselves in their familiarity, and keep on living, because like us, they too are objects and beings of impermanence in a trashy, ever-changing, impermanent world.

This is best summed by two lines in Hello. Page 16, in ‘one good thing’:

one good thing about being alive is the view

and from ‘io’ again, page 92:

when i die know that i died how i lived: not wanting to die

In life’s disposabilities, in the changing faces of the moon, in the oscillations between heartbreak, self-loathing, wheezing with laughter, eating pizza and sitting transfixed by a lover, life is still, well, life. Life is implied in these momentary consumptions and feelings. In fact, life is made better by them, as well as eggs and books, snowballs and party rings. Crispin Best’s poetry is contemplative, thankful and admirable. You can sit with his writing and appreciate it in the same way one might appreciate tulips or butterflies. You don’t necessarily have to understand it, but just be present with it, for now. It’s about taking stock, and loving every inch of your boring, amazing life. Hello has made perfect timing in our current predicament, felt by the world all over. In times like these, you need books like Hello. You need these soft lamentations and appreciations. You need these written reassurances. Hello is like being gently stroked as you wake up from a weird dream. It’s comfort food writing, where when you’re caught up in the chaos of our present-day, you’re reminded to slow down and look, and I mean really look. It’s a wonderful debut collection that is a testament to Crispin Best’s talent.

If this review’s won you over, then you can buy Hello from Partus Press here, follow them here and find Crispin Best all over the Internet via his website here.

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