Untitled - By: Jade Jacobs

Write what scares you

Place exile in-between

that chair until it becomes

a continent and your thighs

are nations at war with stillness.

Say: the sky isn’t blue

it’s just a bruise on god’s lip

or

the mating of light when it tries

to fold itself into another body.

Say: silence is circular.

It always comes back to the seat.

You think you’re empty

until something oozes

out of the pores of your brain

and you think--

A letter. A colour. An image.

Not a memory but the circumscription

of what you remember. The constitution!

of writers is just a collaboration

of

cracks,

collisions,

and conjurings—

a circuitry of

what they call craft

is just chaos with cadence.

Don’t stop at the realisation.

Be flat-footed immediately

at the distortion of a page

and admire the distance

of each margin, faint stuttering lines, and how your finger floats to reach backspace

but don’t write too much.

Stay in the frame. Follow—

follow the flow of the fiction

you’re too frightened to finish.

Hallucinate in “Read Mode.”

Fantasise a dystopia

with apocalyptic tendencies

and a bastard democracy

or

go beyond

the realities of non-fiction.

Write

politics,

noir,

body horror,

a memoir,

smut,

an autobiography—

write about blank spaces

with no blank spaces.

Compare

negative capability

with

positive capability.

Make love with poetics.

We are not babies. Our language

is sensical when mixed with the concept

of architecture. We can be safe

in seriousness and take flight with ambition.

Do not take rejection for failure

but as an excuse to become

an accessory to the art. It is:

project, process, product.

But you forget to play. Play—

with the words, pick apart

the page, press past punctuations,

plunge yourself into peculiar patterns.

Punctuate the pauses.

Pulse without permission.

What are you scared of?

The silence that edits you

before you write

or

that even if you scream in ink,

no one will bleed for it?

Fear is a word.

Write what scares you.

Please give a detailed explanation about the meaning and main idea of this poem.

This poem was written as a way to work through a creative writing block I've been relentlessly fighting for over a year now. Earlier this June, I volunteered at the convocation for my college program's 2025 graduates, where a speaker shared some advice that stayed with me: “Write what scares you. No one can ever take your ambition from you.” I believe that this poem serves as a reminder. A reminder to myself that staying in my comfort zone won’t lead to growth. I wanted to challenge myself to write something outside of my usual style or subject matter--especially prioritising exploration and risk over perfectionism. My belief, after writing this poem, was that it is more rewarding to create boldly and embrace the process than to over-perfect what comes easily (as a perfectionist myself).

Please explain your writing and thought process regarding this poem.

Without being redundant as to my main explanation about the meaning of the poem, "Write what scares you" is more so a poetic meditation on the act of writing. Boldly, at its core, it's about facing the internal obstacles that keep a writer in their comfort zone—fear of failure, fear of imperfection, fear of silence, fear of writing itself—and choosing to write anyway. This poem employs imagery, extended metaphor, imperative voice, fragmentation (as heavily inspired by poets like Lisa Robertson), and lyrical repetition to explore that fear and creative risk.

Why did you choose to write this poem?

I wrote this poem to push myself beyond my comfort zone and confront the fears that have been blocking my creativity.

Do you have any tips or anything to share with the youth writers who may be reading this?

Do NOT wait for perfection. Explore boldly. Write good. Write bad. Just keep writing.