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SingPoWriMo

- SPWM stands for Singapore Poetry Writing Month

- basically there’s a Facebook page where you write a poem a day in response to prompts given daily by mods!

- only happens in the month of April

- they will look for the best works to publish in an annual SPWM anthology

- I participated in the 2015 one and wrote for a couple of days before conceding defeat

- but I strongly recommend you participating in it if you can!!

- this is just an explanatory post so I don’t have to explain anything in my poem posts.... im trying to be minimalist

SPWM Day 1: homecoming

prompt: write a poem featuring the year 2065. bonus 1: use the words: queue, dance, grave, swamp, arrest, love. bonus 2: write the poem as a liwuli or one of its formal variants.

you must rest more / do they feed you well / i will cook curry for dinner on friday / come home soon / to where i await your return her eyes search for a splash of green and then the doorbell rings mom, did you miss me the way i missed you?

SPWM Day 2: mama, who is that?

prompt: write a poem that responds to the given image. bonus 1: include a title that serves to caption the image. bonus 2: incorporate some words from a different language.

darling, it’s a construction worker. be wary. his skin was not kissed by the sun, but a product of genetics. shh, you’ll wake him up. see how his fist is clenched even in sleep. these hands were made not for rubbing tears away, but for holding buckets of cement. but mama, who is he? no need to know, darling. we all know what his job is. let us leave. the sign says this: DANGER - KEEP OUT.

SPWM Day 4: time capsule

prompt 1: write a poem addressed to your younger self, without using the word "I". prompt 2: write a poem in which each stanza fits within a tweet (i.e. max 140 characters). power bonus: combine the two prompts.

(TW: references to self-harm and dieting)

you are fourteen years old and let me tell you this: you are not a failure. you will spend nights in the blue-tiled bathroom, you with your silver blade and underarms lined with angry red dashes. your body is a warzone and every night is a battle: fingers scr ab bling at your throat, trying to rid yourself of everything you know and love. your lips are stitched together with lies and pretenses: no you are not eating low-fat yoghurt because you love it. no you are not returning rice back to the pot because you are simply not hungry. no you are not fine, you are spending night after night after night staring at the ceiling and feeling like your lungs are about to burst. but let me tell you this: you are not a failure. you are a survivor, a fighter. you have spent countless hours crying yourself to sleep but you have also spent hundreds of days telling yourself you can do it you can do it you can do it over and over again so you won’t crack in class. you do not know this yet but you will learn to speak up for yourself, you will love other people the way you have never loved yourself, you will make it. so here you are at sixteen and you have made it.

SPWM Day 5: juxtaposition

prompt 1: write a poem depicting something ugly as beautiful, or something beautiful as ugly. prompt 2: write a poem on the theme of resurrection. (TW: rape)

in his mind, this is how it goes: she is open and gasping beneath him, bruises blooming across the expanse of her neck and chest like curtains bursting into flames, fingers pressing against his arms the way she plays the piano. the sounds coming from her mouth are so pretty, so so pretty, a litany of pleases and stops - ah, it feels like his skin has been set on fire, red dancing along his nerves, his fingers, the back of his eyelids. in her mind, this is how it goes: she is writhing and crying beneath him, pain spreading across every fibre in her skin like a forest fire blazing through land except this time, only ashes are left. her body is weak, hands trying to push him away but there is more muscle in his arms than in her fingers. no, this is not what she wants, she tries to say. please stop i don’t want this you’re hurting me no no no please don’t - then he sinks his teeth into her thigh, and everything is red.

SPWM Day 6: love poem from a nerd to his girlfriend

prompt 1: write a lipogram (i.e. a poem that does not use a particular letter of the alphabet. prompt 2: write a poem that challenges a rule, a law, a habit, a form, a subject, a theme, a mindset: or as many of these as you can.

no, listen to me, i am not about to talk to you about mathematics. look at me. i am not made up of theories. i am not going to evaluate your face with the golden ratio: phi is not everything. genetics did not consider that the antihelix of your ear was not in accordance with the fibonacci sequence; nobody is going to measure the depth of your collarbones or the gradient of the curve of your breasts. you do not need that three centimetres of space between your thighs - place more space between you and conformation to what society expects of you. the solution is not to substitute your skin with another, but to be who your mother gave birth to: a life, not an equation.

SPWM Day 7: (not) a midsummer night’s dream

prompt 1: woo your favourite poet. prompt 2: write a ghazal. bonus: post two poems.

DISCLAIMER: this is entirely un-serious. it is not poetry. i would like to tell you i tried. and i did try, except that this was the result. i’m sorry to all the shakespeare lovers out there i have truly sinned pls forgive me [falls to the ground crying]

last night i dreamt that shakespeare was in love with me. in the dream, i woke up to find him trying to turn on my laptop. i asked him what he was doing, and he replied, “why, m’lady, i woke up this beautiful morning and thought of thy beautiful face. but i could not find any paper nor wood with which to remember thy beauty, and so i am here, using this piece of technology thou owns.” i pulled his hand away from my laptop gently. “william, darling, i’m sorry, but as much as you understand how my laptop functions, i too understand your language.” his moustache was twitching. “does thou not comprehend the language of love? fear not! upon this ground i stand on, i shall give you a poem of love.” “hoe don’t do it-” “shall i compare thee to a summer’s day? thou art more lovely and more…” he looks at the smudged writing on his hand. “……desperate.” “oh my god.” i tear up a little. when did william learn to meme? “my lady, your tears are to your face as rain is to a garden filled with flowers. but your garden is eternal, and only grows more beautiful with the changing seasons.” “william, i am having a moment. do not tell me i look beautiful while crying, my nose turns red,” i tell him sternly, while trying to recall when he had gone on tumblr. “but a nose by any other colour would smell just as well,” he answers solemnly, stroking his beard. i put a hand to his chin. “crave that beard like a goat which craves that mineral,” i whisper. “you…you are the first person to tell me you crave my beard,” he clutches a hand to his chest. “o my mistress, where have you been all my life?” “unborn,” i tell him. he soldiers on. “without you, my life is memeingless.” OH NO, A PUN, my inner self yells at me. and then i wake up. - shakespeare isn’t even my favourite poet it’s literally just bad fanfiction don’t ask me what i was thinking when i wrote this, the answer is nothing

SPWM Day 8: letter to a friend

prompt: write a poem including the following symbols: ! $ &* ( ) . , ‪bonus: include @ # % ^

maybe there are skeletons in your closet maybe your mother left them there maybe you will grow up to be your mother, locking people in closets (but that’s not what closets are built for.) you were always a straight girl. straight As straight lines straight to the point so maybe i shouldn’t have been surprised that you straight-out rejected whoever tried to stick their heads out of their hiding places. $exuality: smooth stroke down a capital S. identity is not a light switch. to you it is as easy as flipping the i in !dentity or finding your misplaced IC on the dressing table or untangling & like a butterfly bow. you once said you would respect people as humans. you forgot to add this: *people who have never stepped into closets.

the prayer poem

prompt:

reading or writing a poem helps slow things down for people. it lulls them into a more contemplative spirit, the way light slows down as it passes from air into glass. engaging with poetry can be a spiritual practice.

1.      write a journal entry of at least 100 words.

2.      make sure all the details are true.

3.      assign line breaks, so the text reads like free verse.

4.      insert at least five details that are untrue or imagined.

5.      feel the thin line that exists between truth and fiction.

6.      title this ‘the prayer poem’.

bonus challenge: include an epigraph. (I included 2 epigraphs. how about that.)

prompt was from SPWM 2015 Day 10 but I only wrote it a year later lulz

this was actually written for a poetry reading event at my school… I didn’t post this on my Livejournal so at first I was like. dude how did I not write anything substantial in 2016. until I looked in my folders and was like RIGHT… THIS EXISTS. anyway keep reading

‘Sad people have the gift of time, while the world dizzies everyone else; they remain stagnant, their bodies refusing to follow pace with the universe. With these kinds of people everything aches for too long, everything moves without rush, wounds are always wet.’

—from Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire

‘The past is a beast that comes at you from every direction, waiting to eat you alive. For years, I have made myself forgetful, to let my mind skim lightly over the surface of my memories, so that I could be at peace with the person I have become. But sometimes the past can sneak up so suddenly, so ravenously, appearing not in a nightmare or a random thought or a suppressed fear, but as a person, in the acts of a loved one, abominable, inexplicable.’

—from Love, or Something Like Love by O Thiam Chin 

In about half a month’s time, it will be exactly a year since we ceased to exist.

A few days ago my friend told me about how she had once gotten into a car crash because her father had swerved to avoid a pedestrian. I asked her what it was like every time she got on a car; did she ever feel unsafe? She shrugged.

“In the beginning I thought I’d never be brave enough to step foot in a car again. But after a while, the sensation of waiting for the car to crash kind of just disappeared, I guess. It gets better with time.”

That’s the way it is with you and me. You were the car and I was the passenger, and we went up in flames. But the funny thing is that the anticipation never quite goes away. At first I thought I was never going to live through the pain of losing you. It took months before you stopped emerging from the corner of my mind to surprise me with an old memory: our discussion on the virtues of eating instant ramen at one in the morning, or perhaps the time we sat in the library and talked for two hours straight. But even now it feels as if the universe wants me to forever be suspended in that split second between the break of a bone and the sensation of pain like a knife put through your flesh – I am always waiting for people to leave, for the bomb to drop, for the roof to collapse.

But she’s right. It does get better. These days, all I feel is a dull ache when I see you in the hallway. Sometimes it comes with the urge to punch your smiling face, or to kick you in the shin. But I’m not a confrontational person by nature. I just don’t have enough courage to change the nature of our relationship and stop pretending we’re strangers.

I still remember every single one of our meetups – I’d get a little lost trying to look for you, but somehow I always managed to find you in the end. I guess it’s true that practice makes perfect, because even now I can still pick you out from a sea of unfamiliar faces. But every time we pass each other by, you are seeing without looking. Eyes always passing over me, never pausing a second longer than necessary. It seems I have become nothing more than a ghost of the past to you. I read somewhere that dead people stay behind as ghosts because they have unfinished business in the world of the living. But see, the thing is that I want nothing more to do with you.

If you still haunt me in my mind, which one of us is the ghost?

A long time ago I told you that I never deleted a single message from you, because I liked to read through our conversations from time to time and laugh at them. And I didn’t lie, at least not at that point in time. But I got so tired of waiting for your reply that I deleted everything I had of you: the pictures, the late night talks, your number. The problem now, though, isn’t the physical reminders of you. It’s the intangible ones that make things difficult—it shouldn’t be possible to permanently delete memories like files in the recycling bin. But somehow you have managed to erase every trace of us from your mind, while I am still reliving history time and again. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a heart breaks in the middle of a corridor and no one is around to watch it crumble, where do the pieces fall? Who’s going to record the things we lost in the fire; who will witness a year’s worth of pretending our history never happened?

The difference between you and a car in a crash is that the car is never quite the same afterwards.

Maybe on the last day of the month, we’ll finally stop the façade. Maybe I’ll throw a party to celebrate the anniversary of your departure, and to celebrate a year of survival without you. And maybe when you finally leave at the end of the year, I’ll stop feeling like an illegal immigrant awaiting detection in a foreign country. I’ll be waiting for that day. I wonder if you’re waiting for it too.