Handwritten Poetry Novels & Stories

“Notes, drawings, things you said to me. It’s all in here.” I took it slowly, flipping through the pages. There were sketches of wolves, half-finished sentences, poems. Her handwriting was messy in places, others neat and precise. There were dates—faded and worn. I stopped at a page with only a single line. “Even if the moon forgets, I won’t.” The words pierced through me like a shard of glass. Something twisted in my chest—grief or longing, I couldn’t tell which. “I wrote that,” I said without thinking.

"Tacos *and* coffee? You're spoiling me. Next thing I know, you'll be writing sonnets about my charcoal smudges." "Already started," I deadpanned, though the image lodged in my mind: verses scrawled in the margins of my own sketchpad, lines about the way her fingers left shadows on paper, echoes of the ones she carried inside. "Sonnet XLII: Ode to the Stubborn Stain. It rhymes with 'pain' and 'again'."

Six years in the fifty years, two years to the fifthiet year When i was a child, my mama used to sing me a poem when i woke up from the nightmares. She'd wipe my sweat and brush away the hair sticking to my face. These hands have subdued stubborn jungles unmasked fertile groves and plumbed the seedful promise of loamy plains The hands calloused like a tortoise shell have tended tendrils, joyous, in their leafy dance on the spine of stakes

It was done, with no coming back. Even if she knew it, she sat again. Took her best pen, paper, and ink. And began to write all untold worlds, into beautiful poetry. That later, she would just save in the deep of her drawer, and never let it see the morning light again. The letter went so: Dear friend, Of You are reading this, is because you already read my first letter. But I still want to tell you, once more. You are special, very special to me.

I wrote the best poetry of my life during the time I lived with Axel and Minah. It was really the only good thing that came of it. I wrote constantly, nightly, daily, eagerly and fanatically. Most of the poems never saw the light of day. Two of them earned me A's in my Advanced Creative Writing class, and one of them was published in an anthology. The rest were too disturbing to even leave in writing. I ripped page after page from my notebook, tearing the sheets into tiny pieces of confetti, and threw them off our balcony to scatter in the wind, or flushed them down the toilet, or just buried them beneath the trash in the kitchen.

On the cover, written in ink so faded it seemed woven into the fabric itself, were the words: *“Incomplete, but never forgotten.” Jo traced the letters with a fingertip. The phrase felt like a promise whispered across years. She opened the folder. Inside was a quiet archaeology of the unfinished. Sketches arrested mid-flow: a portrait where only the eyes held depth, the rest dissolving into rough guidelines; a cityscape skyline abruptly stopping, leaving half a cathedral spire hanging in void. Poems crowded margins or sprawled across pages, trailing off into ellipses or mid-thought, the rhythm stumbling into silence. Letters, intimate and vulnerable, ended mid-sentence, mid-confession, mid-l

I lie here awake but I’m not one to pray, everything’s changed but now I’m okay. I’m rattled this time, can someone lift my chin, keep my head above water before I’m too deep in. I’ve never had problems, where do I begin, but it’s not a problem because I’m just being human.’ I had always liked poetry and this particular one actually got to me because I felt I could relate to it in a weird kind of way. “Poetry is light, poetry is love. That’s a poem written by an anonymous poet on i*******m. Pstar7….”

A single armchair squats in the corner, worn at the arms, a reading lamp bent over it like a question. Julian Croft has a hidden library. The ice king, the man who dismantles empires before breakfast, reads poetry in secret. I walk the shelves. Keats. Frost. Neruda. Dickinson. And Rilke. A whole row of Rilke, different translations, some so loved the covers are mended with tape. I ease a thin volume from the shelf. Letters to a Young Poet. Dark blue cloth, frayed at the corners. I open it and recognize his handwriting instantly. Sharp, angular, the same hand that signed my contract at 4:52 AM.

that's literally just milk and cereal in separate bowls. "Revolutionary," he deadpans. In the poetry section, he stops and pulls down a slim volume with a worn cover. Flips through it slowly until he finds what he's looking for. "Listen to this." His voice drops lower, intimate in the quiet space. He reads a poem about two people finding each other again after years apart, about second chances and choosing love despite fear. The words are simple but devastating, made more so by the way he reads them—slow and deliberate, like each line matters.

I had a book filled with poems I composed myself. I took out a pen from my bag and luckily, after searching the room, I found a stack of papers in one of the bedside drawers. It wasn't luck as much as it was Esme's doing. She was the only one that knew about my little hobby. She had said it was a form of release for me. Perhaps she was right. I found myself writing everytime I needed to express myself and I'd never considered letting anyone see my poems. They were more personal than they were art.