Welcome to the Jungle

Feel free to critique anything but be sure to throw in a compliment while you're at it ;)

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

Commissions for Aid

Hello! It's been a while. I hope you're having a good day.

I'm grateful that you are still following me and like my poetry. Possibly, hopefully, you would like more of it.

I'm opening up TWO POETRY COMMISSION SLOTS for a donation of $5 or up (or the equivalent) to The Palestine Children's Relief Fund under whatever project of their you see fit. You can commission a poem with any prompt you would like to give me- the weather, a story, an anniversary, a love letter- and I will write a poem for you in my style. Go nuts.

To get a taste of how I write, please check @whenyoujustwannawrite

Slot 1: OPEN

Slot 2: OPEN

I am also opening up TWO CHARACTER SKETCH COMMISSION SLOTS for the same, a donation of $5+ to The Palestine Children's Relief Fund. These will be bust sketches with lineart and minimal coloring. You can commission your OCs, any book characters, your FFXIV personas, etc. I won't be drawing gore, mecha, real people, or nsfw. If you want to request a fullbody commission, please message me, and maybe we can work something out.

Slot 1: OPEN

Slot 2: OPEN

This is how we can go about it:

1] Please send me a direct message requesting a commission with the details of what you would like me to draw or write for you. Do not make a donation yet.

2] Once I confirm that I've booked the slot for you and accepted the request, please make the donation and send me a screenshot as proof of your payment.

3] I'll begin working on the commission!

It's horrible to see scores of civilians being killed blatantly, and a whole country's history and lineage be wiped. I do believe that how we respond today will set the tone for how we handle violence or hate in the future. Empathy is necessary, remembering is necessary, aid is necessary,

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

To Saint's Hall

The god-fish over me will fly

My ivory pride gets dashed with muck

I venture forth; their wings will cry

The journey ‘head is scarce of luck.

A trial, one beast-child to charm

With yellow hood on mussel skin

The trick’s to have doubloons on arm

And then be swift  to rest within.

O’er stone and brick, I will strike true

Still water rills in through the soul

A blood-soaked clock, the fear anew

Ascending; still, like those of old.

False are those speaking in red 

Their augury deaf to crepitus

I rise a little t’ward the call

Of bustling, thund’ring exodus.

Among the merchants and the maids

I feel great weight sink into me

I’m tired but I watch the glades

Just started on the litany.

Fourth quest of mine, on foreign land

It’s vast and ripe with putrescence 

I nearly drown, I’m stabbed and damned

The toils I take, a cruel expense.

Here comes a choice: the roads diverge

A thorny path or gambled fate

To find that greed begets a scourge

And though I run, She will not wait.

I brave the fearsome ring of death

Upon my crimson, tardy steed

No one to share my debt or wealth

To Chronos, fervent, do I plead.

One last-a-stretch till kingdom come

I'm hastened 'long by symphony

The doors open to beat of drum

And now I’m where I’m s’posed to be.

The long-drawn final battlefield

Needs patience, grit and sanity

A game of mind, a test of steel

Five hours victim to gravity. 

At last I must return back home

It's where I can lay rest this hearse

With hate, I'm rough; with love, I'm worn

I begin the journey in reverse.

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

do you think change ever changes?

slips out of its time-mottled clothes and puts on a new coat for the winter, that it never looks the same. a different person in every frame, morphing into strangers until you get used to their strangeness and then once again.

i think it works like a spiral. it cycles the same pattern of outfits for the week, like a schedule of medicines in those little plastic boxes labelled neatly with the names of the days. sing garrulous gospels and grow by one on the x axis just to fall by one again. jump gradually from level 2 to level 200 on the slinky of life. circular and tall and splattered with strife.

as i cross the days off and plot a line graph off of them, it looks like a continuous series of bell curves and i can almost hear them ringing like the chime of old earrings worn again.

i like to believe im ready for change, but still i grip the ground to stop from sliding.

of all the things i have to say, the most important is: thank god it's not friday.

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

there is a subtle gravity hiding in my chest.

It's made its home there, and sometimes it sleeps. Silent and soft, ceaseless in its slumber until it's not. It holds me in, pulls me close to myself- hands to heart and hair to head. I'm heedless and afloat. Affording to be affectionate.

Sometimes, it's awake. It peeks its little heads out of my alveoli, diffusing dark gravitational waves growing like smoke in grape wine. It pulls me in, pulls me down. Subtle gravity. My eyebrows droop onto my eyelids just slightly. The tips of my smile slide low, every breath allowing a little of my energy to go free of me. My diaphragm pulls down with more air to dilute my essence as it goes, essentially dripping to my heels and welling at my toes. My eyes see it puddle onto the floor.

My thoughts meet the metaphorical gutter, the dumps, the dreaded demeaning discomfort of spiralling into the earth with no will to pull itself back up. I think to myself, I hate it. I hate you. I hate everyone. And everything.

I think I hate myself, nobody did me any wrong. My eyes heat up. I'm only hoping its waking hours don't last long. After all, this is all my fault. I'm the one with an ill-advised pet living in my pleural cavity.

I hold myself close and caring, just a little bit of grounding against the gravity.

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

Acceptance, I Think

Look at me.

That's the first thing I heard from them but my eyes kept straying away. I've made mistakes ever since I was a stowaway kid finding their own group of people, stowing away the fact that I had the ability to be bad, and hurt people, even when I already had. It was funny in the way things are really not funny when you have to face that some of the problems in your life are your own goddamn fault. I excused it by telling them so what? God made me with all my flaws- don't attack me for it. But heck, even I had to admit, I couldn't buy it myself. Because yeah, I was born with my flaws but that doesn't mean putting up an innocent front excused me from ever confronting them. What a disgrace. I had to learn to face them.

Another mistake was not learning. I yearned for a better life and blamed god and satan (and whoever I assumed had any power more than I had over my own life) but I never learnt that I was the drunken driver behind the steering wheel, and accidents were imminent. Immobile, I sat stiff as if not deciding wasn't a decision. Poisons don't need ignition.

They told me acceptance would heal me through catharsis but I chalked them up to farces because oh, it was more like castration. My brain filed in this information for this moment, as it must be, for now was the one time I was vulnerable enough to have long-denied revelations forced upon me.

I still couldn't look them in the eye and I don't know if I was even trying, to be frank. But they took me by the hand before taking me by the chin and I guess I knew they'd win point blank because I ceased not-seeing. And just stared. I saw how well and badly I'd fared. It was over in a second and I realised and felt and learnt that once it was done, there was no reason to be scared.

I looked up and bared my teeth with arms apart, heart open to the truth. Errors and all, even if it terrified me. Carrying them on me as softly as my skin would agree. I was just human-lust and sloth and pride and greed. But humans always get better, that was true.

Most importantly, though- I learnt to forgive myself as I would forgive you.

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

Sometimes I wanna point out prejudice and privilege without being polite. I'm just not in the mood to abstain from giving out crude, a little rude, rudimentary food for thought. Shrewd, fuck the pleasantries kinda thing. But I have to sing with my cotton-mouthed choir, choraling cutting truths of the world into cut-up, digestible chunks of information just to explain to someone how the world is on fire. I get a bit loud and they put the cotton in their ears, jeer and shove all their fears of confronting actual reality deep, deep inside their sheepish souls. Make me the black sheep of the family and do as they're told by the old, old laws that don't support half the population of this globe. That they'd rather choose oblivion and ignorance isn't surprising but when the time comes: they will be the ones beaten down in the uprising.

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

garden on the moon

chiming in the watery recesses of the city

dark and damp and gritty but

it was a living

when the rain fell like a downpour of burning wicks

onto our bed of grass and twigs

living, living for the dream of

forgetting and forgiving ourselves

washing clean the numerous shelves

records of mistakes we made, what might've been

no hatred, nobody to intervene

eyes glazed with utter contentment when

we yawned leisurely, trustingly

as if sleep were our friend again

like our childhoods had never ended or begun

but there we were, resting in the pocket of a night

that never had to see the sun

i believe life had settled into that moment

chiming and giving

living, living

on that full night in monsoon

crowned with leaves and

the knowledge the end was soon

feeling like we had never stopped believing in the garden on the moon

looking up with our heads in the starry dew

hoping we could reach it soon.

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

God, I love writers.

Writers who give you that strange sense of intimacy in reading a poem about a kiss in a parking lot at 2 A.M. on a wednesday and how it felt like the scuttle of the wind through cornstalks but loud, oh so loud and thinking of a time you felt that same emotion take over just the right places of your brain, heart and nails your first time driving twelve years ago.

Writers who make you feel like they must have whispered to your skin at night and made it spill all its sweet secrets, viscous and vivid, so they could substitute it as solvent for their ink.

Writers who make you remember that your heart is more than a muscle and your brain may be using more than just chemicals and vesicles and electricity to make you feel things that seem to align with the absolute, inherent truth of the universe that cannot be thought in the language of thought.

Writers who take those emotions and make you see more than read their words. They know just how to arrange the intricate curlicues of vowels and flourishes of punctuation so perfectly that it doesn't matter what they're saying, you see those feelings beyond what language itself can offer or afford to be.

Oh, and how could I ever forget! Writers! Writers who speak without dialogue, who express without expressions you have ever heard before. Writers who rip out your soul and play on its string the melody of another person- that they created in their heads! Writers who can move earth and fire simply to make you smile or cry or laugh with them, who drip out the essence of themselves and soak it into paper just to show the rest of us that we are not alone; that things do get better.

The people who plot and scheme to make the world a better place.

This is my love letter to writers.

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

hey

hey there who are you running from

you're chasing the horizon but you're gonna reach the sun

if you really don't want to

be blinded and get burned

my advice is that

you should take the left turn

you don't know how to look for the darkness

you're falling over the edge

there's no line between the earth and the tempest

but it seems you have to go on

go ahead, then

i hope you reach the forefront, the fortress

test your will and test your strength

but know that you can't deny the excess

after having won, after having won

hey there why are you scared

you're gonna hold the whole world

you say your hands are too small to share with

the earth and with your girl

a life lived in gold staring at your reflection

is more to your distaste

you say you'd rather try to tweak the ending

but your dreams are all misplaced

listen to me

your dreams and words should never be empty

you gotta take a flicker, a bit quicker and flee

oh i'm gonna twist and set you free

twist and bend and roll and turn

and faint and fall until i'm torn

between choosing you and the heresy

of walking away from all the things you give me

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

Countdown

One down, come down

And meet me where you always would

Two down, three down

I tried to call you, never could

Four down, slow down

And hit my hand with those five fingers

Six years, seven days but

That touch of yours, it always lingers

Smile at my hair and my nose and my lip there

While I stand, discerning, concerned cause I care

All of those times counting down on the stairs

To right now, when you'd be here, with that grin that you wear for me

Is it for me?

Cause I hope so, is it for me?

I'm reading your eyes, they surprise me, enticed

They're so stormy, is it for me?

Eight ball, it's your call and you want to

Sit under the birch tree in the morning

Nine stitches, hits and misses

I'll take the last time I missed you as a warning

Ten ticks, we sit and mimic

Statues of ourselves, unmoving

It's awkward, but yeah, I'm looking forward

To see if this is what's it proving

To be

And if I can let myself believe, that you

Not just an excuse

With all your hues

You do it for me.

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

I want a nickelodeon life. I want an early 2000's disney life, where I don't need to worry. I go through school, I go through exams, I go through weekends with my ragtag group of friends and we have oddball adventures, hilarious hijinks that never end and bonds that never break.

I don't have to worry about anything major for more than an episode and I have a slow, budding relationship with a sweet friend and we hold hands at prom when I wear the perfect dress with that glossy, pink, cherry-flavoured lip balm on and we sway to some slow song (maybe even kiss at the end), then go dance with the rest of our friends to some other catchy, pop song under shitty lighting. We may have sneaked some vodka in and we pretend to like how it sears down our throats like acid. Grinning, a little tipsy. But we're happy. We're so, so happy. The screen fades to black and we're back the next week with the upbeat title sequence and a new, small problem to deal with just so life doesn't get too boring.

I don't need to worry about capitalism, check my privileges, deal with ignorance, deal with social prejudices and spend hours learning about how to speak about them, don't have to feel the absolute worthlessness I feel when someone laughs at when I am trying to tell them about it after hours and hours of work and research and caring. I don't have to deal with our broken education system, go on pointless rants about it knowing cruelly how I'm probably not gonna be able to change, reluctantly stop spitting fury because whatever I do, I need to study for the exam tomorrow. No anxiety, no depression, no feeling too stupid, no dysfunctional families-no dysfunctional families!- and no thinking about money when you don't have to.

No fear of the world ending because of a nuclear war, global warming, global economic breakdown, no fear of never being enough for anybody, no fear of never finding something that's enough for you. Can you imagine?

 I can, I watched it growing up.

The people on t.v. never go through the painful process of not feeling accepted, of feeling like a fraud, of feeling wrong in your own skin and of simply not knowing what to do with your life and they look so goddamn happy. They never have to work for happiness, they never have to figure why they're happy or what makes them happy and, perhaps most envious of all, at what cost they're getting their happiness.

They never have to face the possibility they might lose it.

Maybe that's why I loved bingeing Victorious back when I had no friends. Maybe that's why I loved Dog With A Blog when I felt like my brother didn't give a shit about me. Maybe that's why I miss the feeling of being surrounded by the happiness and lives of these characters during the hours I spent completely alone at home.

I am a white, blonde, teenage, American girl with a quirky personality who never has to grow up and has friends who always, always unflinchingly fit just right without ever having to talk about it. The sky is sunny and I'm having lemonade in the backyard with everyone I love and we're planning on performing the new song we wrote in the evening.

There's no unrelenting chant of 'this is too much, i cant deal with this, i wanna die, i wanna die, i wanna die' in the back of my head.

Everything is simple, life is good. And you're watching Disney Channel.

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

I wanna take stranger turns sometimes, y'know? Choose paths hiding in plain sight and cross gates I don't usually cross. I see these covered with moss and slathered upon with this quicksand-brand darkness that always pulls me in. Rusted iron fences and doors that nobody opens. Think distant flickers or a tune floating in the air from the other side, fading just before it reaches your ears. A promise of the unordinary, with a tinge of adventure and a huge dollop of wonder. Maybe some tavern-bought ginger ale to wash it down. A force field you go around on your way to work everyday and it feels like you'd stumble and fall into a world not yours if you ever place your foot in, toeing the line. Perhaps waiting for a gust of wind to whisper magic into your hair.

I usually ignore this attraction, fractions of escapist fantasies about the neglected ins and outs of wherever I go. I know they're probably nothing more than holes in walls catching my focus, evidence of me projecting my need to Get Out Of Here. Jut manifestations of my brain wishing there were more to something less.

But sometimes, I swear I feel like they're just sitting there, calling. Waiting for me to notice More.

I hope that some day, I will.

[drearydaffodil]

Perhaps it was my

Last attempt at hope that led

Me into despair

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

Disrepair, disregard

For the not-caring times when

They gave me trophies for trying

And stars for smiling

Now I wish on shooting stars for

Giving me ride

Hitchiking up, up, up

And away.

[drearydaffodil]

Sometimes sleep is not

About rest, it’s escape–throw

Yourself into dream

[quietdissidentlyricist]

Sometimes dreams are worse

Nightmares’ horrors no escape

In sleep or awake…

[drearydaffodil]

Dreaming and drowning

Two sides of the same coin, I’m

Learning how to swim

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

Swimming in a night-dark sea, seeds

Of doubt blooming lillies

Throw yourself in them and grieve

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

Falling into faulty fallacies feathered and hidden by fancy phonetics feeling flawlessly fierce and frightened following each other, and fending off frolicking frenzies of February frost-like, feeble hits to my freedom; frozen in the air

-is alliteration poetry?

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

What it’s like

There comes a point, as a writer, where nothing matters anymore.

Each letter you type falls flat and lifeless onto the page similar to but not unlike a Pinocchio, wanting to be real. Wanting to be alive.

Each word you string together cuts off the chain, like cutting off oxygen to a dying patient because hey, it was useless anyway. It was inevitable. Almost dead. Why do I even try to write?

Each sentence you jot down feels like it wants to bend in so many directions and just break because it can’t take the pathetic mockery it is of what it was meant to be.

Each paragraph you pen looks vaguely like two dimensional darkness with light from the back of the page trying to shine through the many, many cracks and flaws in it. All those cracks and crevices of words broken, torn off and letters that come sharpened to stab at yourself, only just held together for the sake of coherence by taping scraps of ideas and plastering your image onto them. But the plaster drys and hardens and deforms. You’re not a sculptor, you’re a writer.

And yet you can’t write.

Essay upon essay, draft upon draft pile up like a body count of all the inspiration you’ve killed. You write and you write and you sigh for a second because how much is enough? How much is too much? When should you stop?

You’re a serial killer with a motive to get it right one day and you’re hiding all your crimes under your workdesk. You’re a necromancer trying to breathe life into what is, or should be, hopeless. You’re an alchemist trying to get something out of nothing because nihilism is your motto and you know in your veins that this time, it’ll be right.

You used to be a creator, though, trying to pour out each drop of your essence and trying to convert it into the currency of words at the exchange comission of your sanity. You like that better, maybe.

But, really, aren’t they all the same thing?

You are all of them. That much is a fact. Why? Because you are a writer and a writer is a thousand different people they wrote about and if you liked it better, you should keep at it.

Because being a writer is not just any of those, it’s knowing that no matter what, you will keep on writing.

[brooklynbubbles-deactivated2018]

I wanna make everyone proud

Chin up

Strap down.

Take no shit

Discovered this courage in the lost and found.

Making everyone hopeful

Just to let yourself drown.

Trying to find my fucking purpose

Make the world go round.

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

Maybe stop it on its axis

If I please

Fast-forward through the bullcrap

Never down on my knees

I just hope that I can get up

Never stop, never cease

To keep developing my vision

And share it with the seven seas

[september-stardust-deactivated2]

Go and find

a place to stand

Release a battlecry

so grand

beneath your feet

feel quaking land

You’ve made your mark

Your flames you’ve fanned.

[watcher-ofthe-sky]

So burn yourself into those thousand sparks,

And listen to the rhythm of your beating heart.

The hell that you’ve made in yourself

Cossets the demons who smirk at you broken spirits.

Let your scream be so loud

That it will deafen all the other shouts.

Paint your realm in your own colours,

The sword that you possess

Can slay every demon.

[andygoestohell]

And when everything turns to nothing

Rise from the ashes and spread your wings

Put on your golden crown and sing

Of freedom and hope and fallen kings

Of rebirth and light and all good things

So that every weakened and bowed man

Every oppressed and chained woman

Will burn their shackles, light up like the sun

And once again truly free will run

Free to love and live and to have fun

And make this world a better one