I don’t like when Jane leaves the baby’s door open, But we’re away now. This house is heavy with strangers' history, It's peeking out of the shaded paths and gardens swollen With verdure; hinting at the tantalizing possibility of mystery And restorative power of air, after all, that’s why we’re here
John doesn't believe in fantastic daydreams (Imagination is a delusion perpetuated by fools) John says we are sleeping in the nursery for its sunbeams But there are bars on the windows like metal rules And it is papered in a grotesque sin of undulating chaos
It inhabits me, twirling dreadful arabesques behind my eyes Momentarily. Many yellowed Almost, not quite, dead It grows within me Dis- -tending my belly No no no
This air will do me good.
I move as a somnambulist through the morning Succumbing to sleep in the afternoon (Moonlight brings the amber insomnia of the walls Bends my eyes from sleep) But it is nothing. Merely my own laziness. A hysterical tendency. Really. shhh..
SULFUR Color SULFUR Scent In my (inhale) lungs and (Shoulder to the wall, follow) on my clothes Proptotic eyes leering from crooked necks Carious fingers reaching into-
Fireworks on the forth of July and me, with the docile vengeance of a failed mother Writing with the frantic purpose of a bumblebee, …If a bumblebee was splitting in two
two layers of the wall One mutating concentric fungal prison One captive-her? (Her that creeps, her that inhabits [me] the wall)
I am tired. But I must find the origin. Pattern. Meaning. I know it holds someone.some memory Hidden
My shoulder is covered in yellow pigment My knees hurt (faded band following the baseboard pressure of a shoulder in orbit)
She hides, but she is mine She who-I who shake the wallpaper- SHE shakes the wallpaper in moonlight I who shake the wallpaper I who T E A R with teeth and claws my prison from the wall I who creep beneath the paper (crept behind the paper) FREE OF- John oh,
J O H N
You're in my way.
Based on the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman