This poem is a creative response to
The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Alone.
Three years gone, all
Spent in this room.
I barely leave, I don’t try. I
Know I am desolate. I see it
And so do they.

I live, but I don’t feel alive.
Why eat? I don’t deserve food.
I don’t feel the need to indulge
in the senses. I merely don’t crave it.

Every night...
I stay up staring at the dimly lit Walls.
Every day...
I Lie awake while the sun peaks
Through the cracks in the blinds
Illuminating my only companion.

I gaze into the eyes of the Walls.
They stare back
Watching me struggle.
Laughing at my regression.

What is happiness? Joviality?
What is a gleeful day?
A happy thought? I
Wouldn’t know. Because I...

Well I am nothing. Nothing
To him, and nothing to you.
I am repulsive. Who could
Stand my reflection, it’s
Repugnant.

I have removed the mirrors
In the room that holds me
Captive. Like my self-esteem
They are shattered at my
Own gross reflection.

Gave up.
I gave up long ago,
I’m hopeless. Incurable.
I have become nothing. And
Like the rest, my Husband
Will leave me soon.

I don’t concentrate. I can’t.
I used to pulse energy of
Knowledge to minds that
Drank the gulps of enlightenment
Making their brain’s throb.

He tells me; I’m sick. I
Tell him; I’ll cope. He gives
Me a pill once a day,
I keep it under my tongue.

He repeats over and over…
‘I am a Doctor, and I will help you.’

He’s not helping me.
It’s for himself. His own self
Appearance. He wants to look
Proficient to his patients. If he
Cared he would listen to my words.
He would have heard the cries
In the script I taught and wrote.

My friends are gone, they
Left me to wallow in the
Eyes of the paint that covers
These Walls.

Sometimes I’m disillusioned
That people care when I speak,
Until I realize that we are all
The same. In small groups
That my Husband leads we talk
About our lives that are left in
Shambles…

We discuss our own
Worthlessness. Utter forlorn diction
To one another. We understand
The lexicons we produce. We are
All alike. We write our thoughts
But no one cares.
Together we look for Happiness,
But she hides from our group.

My Husband, the Doctor
He pries when we talk.
Pries for more. He questions me
About the Walls. He thinks they
May be alive, in the eyes of myself.
He thinks they talk, he thinks I talk
Back. But the Walls can’t talk;
The Walls can only judge.

They judge my dreadful appearance,
They judge my inability to change.
The Walls deem me an unfit wife,
A Mother of nothing, a friend of
No one, a tragedy to this World.

He thinks I misplaced my Sanity,
As if I’ve gone madd. I may see
No light in the day, for I am
Not blind, I am just alone.

I have made the attempts
But I have never set a plan.
I don’t have the capacity to
Project my future, I can only react.

Reacting is what I did... What I’ve
Done. I reacted to the Walls constantly
Judging me. I reacted to a three year
Aversion to the outside World.
I reacted to *my reality.

The only way I knew how, I
Reacted. The Walls think they
Can judge me? Now the Walls are
Judged. It was your fault, your
Eyes pierced my soul, and
Stole the breath from my lungs.

I was not deranged, my faculties,
Were never vanished but my heart was.
I lost my smile, I lost my life... everything
I knew... I reacted. I left my body contained
To those Walls that judged my dreadful display,
I rose above and looked down... And I saw a smile.

How distasteful you are,
With your sundry splotches
and jarring imperfections.
Oh, you taunt me so!
Whether your anathemas
are reflected through the mirror or my own eyes.
Oh horrible, hateful, heinous thing!
I cannot bear to stare any longer.
How sickly your color is--
A pallid yellow, like one giant bruise
That has budded and blossomed
In some unnaturally grotesque fashion.
My blood boils, my pulse races
And I raise my weapons to fight--
Two talons--claws honed to perfection.
Be gone, you wretched scab!
And so I tear, scratching furiously,
Until no more of you is left.
The blood is stuck beneath my fingertips,
Or what is left of them.
My sinews tremble, ****** and bare,
As the last of my wallpaper
Is ripped from my bones.

Growing up in a loud and boisterous world,
makes it easy to seek solace in the
shadows
It allows for a fine-tuning of the senses,
in order to mirror what those around you
show

Quietly and dutifully, you play nursemaid
to everyone else's needs
Eventually losing touch with that inner voice that pleads

Remaining consistently neutral and in-tune
with others, has seemingly served
you well
Though the waves of ignored and
forgotten emotions, uncontrollably start
to swell

So becoming comfortable projecting a
voice, that you never really had
Is quite the challenging and daunting task
to an introverted empath

In a midwinter night’s dream
  i found myself lost again,   
  or was it even this year ?
  It may even go back farther
  than yesterdays out of reach,  
  older than an ancient pyramid stone
 
Before the rebirth of past life deposits,
  unborn orphaned motherless sediment,
  flotsam of the ages adrift,
  unknown for more than a thousand years

... waiting for so long to see beyond the bounds

High atop a slippery edge-cliff
  i clung  ―            
Searching for a deeper understanding
  of who i am;

Roosting like a starving bird of prey
  with a broken wing
  born alone ... holding on
  With a fear in his eyes
that only i could comprehend
  
  Staring way down deep in the pith,       
into an internal pitch black abyss,
  just begging to see beyond ―
  Mindful it's so hard looking
  into the eye of a storm

Intimately parsing the recurrent source
  of reigning pain
Where the perpetual fog of isolation dwells;
an inversion,     preventing dispersion
  of the nimbus  cold  and  dark

In the darkness, there bides a suffocating
  emptiness,  
  A swelling silence what loudly knells,
  leeching through a perennial ache

An abating voice within hollers unheard,
  invisible as a bitter cold wind howling
  relentlessly through the hollow pang;
  Echoing the subsiding say
(squeezed out) ... of an orphaned soul
  deep beneath the light

Awakening to realize  ―  once i was alive
  and
i could feel me holding on to you



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