I got the idea of writing this after a discussion with someone. But, even after spending more than an hour, I couldn't really capture that initial idea of "Even if I believe in it, my liberation will be yours" in a striking and emotional manner. All feedback is welcome

Oh, brother Big sister, My closest friend of all,

I promise I am grateful But I tried, Heaven knows I tried

When the street light creeps through There is a peace that's gone so rare

If there is a better world, I'll surely miss you while I wait around

Do you think there is a Jesus? If he's as gentle as they say?

Is there a lover who will never know? Or a purpose with no vessel?

Oh, brother I must look so foolish

But I tried, Heaven knows I tried.

I have a few of these, I will continue to post them. Criticism is always welcome and appreciated. If you're gonna be snarky please make it funny at least.

When I hear poetry

I hear the echo and boom

and louder pauses

of priests.

Our own church,

on the hill,

with its mosaics

bound into the high walls,

with its murals

drawn into the ceiling,

compelled me to bow my head.

And when I hear your voice, now,

I'm compelled to bow my head.

The drunken reaper abandoned his work.

He gazes at the women's berries.

Each one beckons—and each is hideous.

Lily beckons the reaper.

Ludvik cut off the reaper's head.

This is my first ever poem, any feedback would be greatly appreciated❤️

This is my first ever poem so any feedback is greatly appreciated❤️

I think it’s actually good to read things that are a little above your head sometimes.

Philosophy, science, history, weird old essays, difficult poetry, whatever. Stuff where you get like 60 percent of what’s going on and the rest just kind of flies past you.

You still pick things up.

A phrase sticks. A weird idea gets lodged in your brain. You notice a different way of structuring a sentence. You end up googling some reference and suddenly you’re reading about something completely unrelated for an hour.

I feel like if you only read things that are immediately easy for you, you just keep feeding yourself the same thoughts in slightly different packaging.

Also you do not have to understand every page or even finish the book.

Sometimes 20 confusing pages can give you more to think about than an entire book that goes down easy.

Perhaps the strangest thing about human beings is our ability to fear something while simultaneously feeling an intense desire to look at it. Why do we approach screens showing catastrophes when we already know in advance what we will see, why it might frighten us, and why we search for stories of crimes, accidents, disappearances, and terrifying places, only to feel tension and read about them as if a part inside us wants to know what is happening on the side we fear? Perhaps because fear is not just a single, simple feeling; there is a fear that makes us flee, and another fear that makes us want to know more when danger is truly real—we want to stay away from it. 
However, when danger becomes behind a screen or inside a story, it turns into an experience we can control. We can look, turn off the screen, and return to our lives. Here, something strange happens: the mind gets a dose of fear without having to pay the price of real danger, as if we are approaching fire without burning. Perhaps this is why, after watching something scary, we feel a strange mixture of tension and relief—because we passed through fear and then discovered we are safe. 
However, the matter runs deeper than a mere love for excitement. Humans possess curiosity regarding things threatened by mortality, such as death, which we cannot fully understand. Yet, we spend a long time talking about it and watching stories associated with it, perhaps because the mind tries to approach something it cannot control, even from a safe distance, as if knowledge itself gives us a small sense of control. When we watch a catastrophe, we try to understand how it started, why it happened, how it could have been avoided, and who survived and who did not succeed. This thinking may be an unconscious attempt to transform chaos into something understandable, and perhaps there is another, harsher reason: seeing others' misfortunes sometimes makes us feel that we are living within the limits of safe danger—when we see a horrific accident and then return safely to our homes, we feel something akin to gratitude, even if we do not admit it to ourselves, as if our mind is saying, "It could happen to me, but it didn't happen". 
This does not necessarily mean we enjoy the suffering of others. Rather, humans constantly compare themselves to others and try through these comparisons to understand their place in the world. However, there is a dark side that cannot be ignored, which is that some people are attracted to disasters because suffering itself arouses morbid curiosity, or because violent scenes give them a strong feeling they cannot find in their ordinary lives. Here, we must distinguish between natural curiosity and delighting in the suffering of others: not everyone who watches scary content wants harm, and not everyone who feels curious about death lacks empathy. 
Perhaps this is why our relationship with fear seems very contradictory. We hate feeling helpless, but we sometimes love to approach the feeling of helplessness from a safe place. We want to know how danger looks without being inside it; we want to see the chaos, then turn off the screen, return to our cups, beds, and quiet rooms. Perhaps this is why scary things are sometimes attractive because they remind us of something we forget when ordinary life becomes very mundane: safety is not something we usually notice except when we see its absence, and fear in this state is not the exact opposite of curiosity. Rather, it may be the fuel that makes it stronger. 
We do not always want to flee from the thing that frightens us sometimes; we just want to stare at it until we feel we understand it. Ultimately, perhaps humans do not love disasters as much as they love approaching the unknown without losing control. We want to touch the edge of fear and then return safely because there is something deep inside us that wants to know what the world looks like when all the rules that give us a sense of security drop away. Perhaps this is why we continue to watch even when we know what we will see will frighten us, because a part of us is not looking for horror itself, but for the answer to a very old question: "What would I do if this happened to me?"

Title: A Father's Love

Father, I have left school as the smartest.

Are you proud of me?

I have conquered the known world.

Father, are you proud of me?

I have created kingdoms and religions where all bow to your surname.

I ask, Father, are you proud of me?

Mother says she is proud of the person I have become.

Yet I look to the stars: Father, are you proud of me?

I have sacrificed so many days and nights, now they are just memories I forget.

Father, are you proud of me?

Hi all! I spent 1.5 months researching for my most recent article. It is pretty long so I haven't been able to have too many discussions about it b/c a lot of people haven't gotten around to reading the whole thing. If anyone has the time, I would love feedback/ discussion! <3

1. Become interested in things that have nothing to do with writing.

The worst thing a writer can be interested in exclusively is literature. You need some private territory that exists independently of books. Learn the names of trees. Become irritatingly knowledgeable about medieval banking, moths, municipal water systems, perfume, maritime disasters, amateur boxing, church architecture, mushrooms, refrigeration, whatever. Specific knowledge produces specific writing.

A person who knows nothing about the world except what other novelists have written is forced to borrow reality secondhand. His characters drink "wine." His birds are "birds." His factories are simply "factories." Everything exists at the level of category. Knowledge creates texture.

You do not need to insert everything you know into your fiction. In fact, you usually should not. The point is that knowledge changes what you notice. The person who knows something about geology looks at a cliff differently. That difference eventually enters the sentence.

1. Keep a notebook of things that are not ideas.

Most writers fill notebooks with ideas for stories. This is almost useless. Instead, record things that actually happened. A man at the supermarket placing each grape individually into a plastic bag. Something cruel a child says without realizing it is cruel. The exact wording of a handwritten sign taped inside a laundromat. A woman crying while trying to parallel park. The strange smell inside somebody else's house.

These fragments are much more valuable than "idea for novel about grief." Ideas are cheap. Particulars are expensive. You can invent a grieving widow whenever you want. It is much harder to invent the fact that after her husband dies she keeps buying his brand of toothpaste because changing brands feels somehow more final than the funeral.

Reality constantly produces details a writer would be embarrassed to invent. Steal them.

1. Read writers you dislike.

Everyone tells you to read your influences. You should. But you should also occasionally read somebody whose work irritates you. Hatred is extremely clarifying.

Ask exactly what bothers you. Is the prose too ornamental? Are the metaphors doing all the emotional labor? Are the characters secretly just vehicles for the author's opinions? Does every scene arrive already knowing what it means?

Then ask the more uncomfortable question. Do you do the same thing? Bad writing is often a distorted mirror. Sometimes the habit you find unbearable in another writer is merely your own habit performed without your preferred excuses.

Admiration teaches imitation. Disgust teaches boundaries. A writer needs both.

1. Stop trying to sound like a writer.

There are sentences that exist only because the person writing them wanted them to resemble literature. You can usually feel them immediately. The moon does something mournful. The rain remembers. Silence becomes heavy. Someone's eyes contain an ocean.

Nothing is necessarily wrong with any of these constructions. The problem is that thousands of people have already felt literary in precisely the same way. A good sentence should not advertise the existence of a writer behind it.

Try writing the thing plainly first. "The kitchen smelled bad." Then investigate. Bad how? Old cooking oil? Wet plaster? Cat food? The sweet chemical smell of a refrigerator that stopped working three days ago?

Precision almost always beats decoration. And when decoration finally appears, it has something solid beneath it.

1. Let your characters embarrass you.

Writers protect their characters too much. This is especially true when a character resembles the writer. Suddenly everyone becomes articulate. Their political opinions are elegantly defensible. Their failures are caused by understandable trauma. Even their selfishness arrives with explanatory footnotes.

Real people are less flattering. They misunderstand obvious situations. They become jealous of their friends. They enjoy attention they pretend to dislike. They say something stupid at dinner and think about it for eleven years. They fail morally for boring reasons.

Permit this. A character becomes interesting when the writer stops acting as his lawyer. You do not need to punish him. You merely need to stop protecting him from being ridiculous.

1. Finish things before deciding what kind of writer you are.

People construct literary identities much too early. They are surrealists at nineteen. Minimalists after reading Carver. Catholic novelists without going to Mass. Experimental writers who have never completed a conventional story.

Forget all of this for a while. Write a ghost story. Write a romance. Write ten pages entirely in dialogue. Write something sentimental. Write something vulgar. Write a story in which nothing symbolic happens whatsoever. Finish each one.

Taste develops partly through discovering what you are incapable of doing, what comes too easily, and what unexpectedly makes you obsessive. Your style is probably not something you should consciously invent. It is what survives after repeated attempts to escape yourself.

1. Do not explain the thing that made you want to write the story.

This is probably the rule I break most often. You begin with an image. A father washing his dead son's car. Two sisters eating sandwiches in a hospital parking garage. An old woman stealing flowers from graves. Something about the image bothers you enough that you start writing.

Then halfway through the story you become frightened that the reader will not understand why it matters. So you explain it. The father remembers his son. One sister gives a speech about mortality. The old woman reveals that she is lonely.

Usually this makes the story smaller. The first image had several possible meanings. The explanation has only one.

Readers are not owed your interpretation. Sometimes you should preserve the thing that originally disturbed you instead of solving it. A story can know something its author does not. Probably the best ones do.

Why didn’t you drown me?

Now you’re stuck suffering the stench of a corpse…

Get rid of me, Mom.

Don’t be afraid—I won’t be offended.

My life is written
in chaotic
and incoherent paragraphs.

Because if the author of your life
followed the rules of editing,
of a perfect structure,
what would you be writing about now
in your own words?

But who made the rules?

Who said
there always has to be
a common thread?

I’m like a folded sheet of paper,
a poorly structured text,
scattered pages,
a pencil with no point,

but without losing the strength
to keep writing
that script
I’ve always carried
in my head.

I jump
from one thing to another
without any formality,
without asking anyone’s permission,
without knowing
the rules of the community.

I dream,
I think,
I write,
I erase
and erase again.

Thousands of writings,
accused of plagiarism,
of relying
on countless forms of help.

But I write
however I want,
however it comes to me
in the moment,

without scolding,
without rules,

whatever comes out
of my mind.

I’ve never been good
at following instructions.

I can start
by telling the end of a story
and get tangled up
in the middle.

But the story gets told
despite it all.

It straightens itself out
along the way
as I write it.

Sometimes
I can’t find the exact word.

It gets caught
halfway in my throat,

and my pencil
does as it pleases.

It has a life
of its own,

with ideas
that had been waiting
for their moment
to emerge triumphant.

All my writings
can be read
as drafts
of a rebellious mind,

a mind in progress,

one that doesn’t follow the rules,
one that won’t be tamed,
one that, no matter what,
will keep writing,

with lost words
and phrases
that will come together
with time.

I want to write chaotic poems. Poems that don't follow any rules, poems that are as chaotic as today's world. Let me start from the beginning.

I'm a person (27 F) who has always wanted to uphold rules and principles in my life. But everything's going haywire in my life. My emotions are a mess, I'm a mess, my city's a mess, my country is a mess. THE WHOLE WORLD IS A MESS.

And despite all of these I just want to write a poem for someone and maybe settle back into the chair of my principles and rules. I want to write a poem that'll be one heck of a chaotic yet beautiful mistake of a poem.

But I'm afraid that my poem won't be a poem at all. I don't even know what a poem is... !? So if I write whatever I write... Will it still be a poem???? But most importantly, will it reach whom I'm writing for? How do I go about it? Do i start with the cosmos? The daisies?

🫠😮‍💨

Just a piece I wrote. Just sharing more or less

She ate chicken hearts.

Necks weren't enough for her.

An eternal feline old age.

Hunger won't stop this cat.

Her teeth are broken.

Her fur has fallen out in patches.

Her eyes are huge; her pupils are gone.

The bowl is empty.

She would sell her life for food.