WE THE POETS
Poet of the Month

Let Me Write

by Safi Aziz
13 years old, Tredyffrin Easttown Middle School

Let me write, just to soothe my soul
Give me a piece of paper to put my sorrows down.
“But why bother?”
I asked myself one cold day.
Life itself is strange.
In the beginning I was told to find my all.
And then I was told,
“Stop! Luck only gets you so far.”
As they believed it was luck that carried me.
It was all about being "#1 of the Class" taking the rep. for the academy ...
I have to say one thing.
That life was going to be over for me.
The pen’s my weapon, my heart my essence.
I do what my heart tells me, I write out word for word.
Excuse if I am being a bit harsh. But life is.
But this world is just one story.
It’s not over after this one.
There is always another thing.
That one thing that turns our life from the unstable ground
into a rushing river where I would go to swim, to battle death.
I was delighted to, but before soon, death rejected me.  
Its nerve expired because only hatred and dead pain runs through my fight.
Let me write before dying from the inside
The pen’s my only weapon to fight my pain.
Nothing annoys me more then it.
Dull as it is by now. Hidden for so long.
To anyone it would be a torrent of twisted, dark grime but it’s not.
It’s a battle fought far too long.
Sign my death warrant but don’t worry, as your hand trembles, you won’t remember it after a few moments.
I am going to continue my route, my road, bare feet walking through glass of all the
unleveled cruelty that is not bound to a freeway.
I have another question.
Were we born into a world that we were all made into a demented substance where we were immediately challenged with thousands negatives with us being the only positive?
I think so.
So let me write and keep fighting these negatives
these demons.
Thank you. But where did my demon go?
It went with the pain. Inside, and ripped me apart.
I have the ink as black as my soul to heal my wounds.
To relieve my weight.
The weight that held me down so I couldn’t reach the frozen wind.
The wind that stood above the grave, like ice, so you were trapped screaming for it to melt.
Though after you realized the battle was over, you were
already worn out, because peace dies. In a mix of not-so-guilty mirage.
I was not craftily engineered to speak like this.
This came with what life gave me.
And I will take what it does.
Its sorrows, its fear, its dead tears.
Though my words are perhaps not to your taste?
You, attached to the system to the point of no longer seeing the rope around your neck
In regular slavery so unexpected.
It all started because
of that strife to be number 1 in the academy.
I am seeing death approach in the distance though.
I smile. Time to end this. For all time.
But…
I am suddenly gasping.
Choking
I need air.
Everything becomes confused in my head
All I ask for just another pen to draw my wings
So I may fly higher find my air. But I knew I was like a grain of sand in the wind
The forsaken abyss where lacking no broken soul meant you would not survive.
But who wanted to survive here?
Then I saw my escape, it was clear
I saw it there, but my soul was too beat
My soul was a lover of the unexpected.
So it decided to take a step to begin the journey "to the roots".
Yet I misunderstood, it wanted to make me destroy my past.
I wouldn’t let it not swallow my past
”At least some things ...” It pleaded
“Do you not see my anguished soul?!” I exclaimed
“Time passes, life goes.” It replied calmly, persuasively.
I shoved it unannounced out past the ice that contained me.
And it left.
I was free. But I was in oblivion....
As it left, I flew.
I flew ahead without ever looking back
The horizon came closer. And when I reached it
I realized I was where I started.
My career, my life, my success, number 1 at the academy.
Now, the future is not in my hands
what was mine, is still mine, I have entrusted to the only part I had left, intellect.
Because intuition is all reasoning
and it reasoned that I needed a change of scenery.
Something less hardcore.
And only then did I realize
Everything would be hardcore.
And I won’t act as if I had taken into life’s trap
Just because I misunderstood.
I understand. And death has to dance with me now.