'Ten years from my successful seventeen, and a cold voice says: What have you done, what have you done?'
Sylvia Plath - journal entry Wednesday 4th November 1959.*

Now, like a typewriter ribbon,
worn-down and weak
as a shrinking pencil,
but there are white days
among those fruitless, bare ones,
spasmodic,
where the machine
gorges on characters
you create.

Multi-coloured rhapsody,
confident stories
have upped and left,
what can you do,
what have you done.
Feast on unknown delights,
astrology or foreign waffle
and wait for them to come.
They will come.

Ten years, ten calendars gone,
now your hair is up
rather than tumbling down,
need some buoyancy in a bottle,
medicine again,
take twice a day.

What you need,
crave, long after seventeen
sleeps inside you
silent
and will come alive,
your small siren,
as will every pitch-black word.