They say I am like her,
and her,
but that is
blasphemous,
backhanded as
my sorrow must
bleed through.

Cannot make it
pretty,
there is no way
to make it
tender.
Cannot wish it into
a petal, a leaf,
there is no way
to warm the
sun.

They say I am like her,
but she is in
the dirt buried by
her own
hands-
and her hands
too!
She cried straight
into the
crypt.
Diagnosed with
the
disease of
death.

Do they also say
they hope
I end
like her,
or her,
too?

Perhaps      the    best of me      is behind              beyond
that          point of irreversibility           a beacon
of       inevitability           and it serves                as such

I am no longer       shiny     or     shocking     or     new
a        brown paper bag           crumpled     and      creased
milk that     sours    and      curdles        a   homesick     orphan

a     lamb   on    its   back   and    I  will   always   be    a  child
I will   always   be   a   child   I    will    always     be   a   child      

Love      contorts     me             I    curve    and    twist    
and       grow          larger           and            wider
I am              a flesh ball               a blush balloon
punctured by         a mere *****                I am sensitive

tuned        too tight        like my         Grandmother’s    piano
but it was     the first   I ever played     so no other     sounds right
and    I tell      my first       love      the       same        thing

I am entropy         the blaze of a sun          a deity of delusion
a fickle fig                                                 (pick, peel, devour)

I am a tear in your jeans    a loose thread     a love-sick sack
a daughter                                     (and some days, a mother)

I am tin teeth      a blade in your belly      a hive in your head
a feeble fawn                                                      (a black bull)

I am an amalgamation of       deficiency     and         divinity
coarse and common as coal        I am the     sun    the nether
the shade under the rock         I am nothing       nothing at all

~
She stands on the roof of the world, a ship in a bottle. She likes to wave at passing boats, inviting 120 volts to raise their sails.

Words unbosomed -- her attempt of blotting out the sun and those bloodletting habits.

Her eyelids say, "Only the disquieting muses have time for me." So she writes like an umbrella, shading reality; remembering pluck and luck stories about bumblebees, lovingly wrapped in Tiffany-blue ribbon and paper.

Father used to solve her every contemplation. Now indecisiveness in what she asks. Now indecisiveness in arbitrary tasks.

And she and her negative capability are the last two awake at a slumber party, giving commonplace words the allure of secrecy.

You see, she is only harmless when she sleeps.
~

These days I’ve been looking to the past, to all the women before me. The revolutionaries whose words helped shape the way I see the world; the way I see nature; the way I see simple, ordinary pleasures of life become extraordinary.

These days I let my pen flow freely across the page. I look to all the women before me for guidance because I find myself afraid to speak my own truth. They teach me with words how to live presently, never looking back because there’s no room for mistakes to reside here.

These days we’re on a first name basis. With wide-eyed clarity, all the women before me allow a short glimpse of them as they once were: bright young things full of hope with a cigarette loosely balanced between faded red lips and hands that move deftly over a typewriter. The room is filled with cigarette smoke and incense. I can almost smell it now but the vision is gone with the wind.

These days I seek out: Zelda; Sylvia; Anne; Emily; Joan; Virginia. To all the women before me, I have found you. They’re no longer a black and white still photograph or a short film reel. In those moments, they stay forever young etched in time from decades ago.

These days I welcome you all in my waking dreams. To all the women before me, you are not lingering ghosts being passed by unseen. You are not remembered for how you left this earth but for how, after all this time, you still remain unchanging.

i feel like sylvia plath,
or james dean when he said
“live fast, die young, and
leave behind a beautiful corpse.”
except he didn’t say that.
but sylvia plath was volatile
to her mind
and a tortured soul.
the carbon monoxide
filled her soul,
just as the misery fills mine.
the burning desire to exit,
to end it.
the desire to burn the
fires inside my mind.
the poetic way of james dean,
and sylvia plath
lives in my veins
and feels like a raging fire
that cannot be tamed.

In response to Edge by Sylvia Plath

"The moon has nothing to be sad about,  
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag."
-Edge by Sylvia Plath


The night drips on and on
As they all just watch.
Wonder what got her so far-
What's got her in knots.
This is how they wanted her,
No denying that now.
Perfection in her silence,
Her last breath,
Her broken vow.
The moon has nothing to be sad about.

She looks down on her with apathy,
Just another face in the crowd-
They watch her as she scorches it
All to the ground.
Her body a vessel for pain and for persons,
Her mind gone numb from being treated so worthless.
The moon-
Having seen this all before,
Illuminates the horror within that small home
Staring from her hood of bone.

Although not new,
It is still tragic-
To see such a woman drained of all her magic.
To have once brought life,
The same that she has taken,
And now on her kitchen floor they all lie
Naked.
The moon just sends them back
To the roots of being- for
She is used to this sort of thing.

Life here on earth feels particularly brutal,
Like there is no escape
And to dream of such would be futile.
Don’t let it get you down,
For it is truly just womanhood,
You belong to the silence-
To the frowns.
So tightly sew that pretty mouth shut,
Sworn to be either dead or gagged-
Her blacks crackle and drag.

I am tired, and I am tired of making it beautiful.  Petals flung over the edge do not soften the fall. Adjectives do not halt decay. Spinning corpses in sugar is a sticky, pointless ordeal. If I let the moonlight paint me in all her violet shades they begin to look more like bruises. A single star, a gunshot wound. I think about how small I must look from all the way up there. I think about how I won’t live past twenty.

It’s such a dramatic scene, a fanciful notion ripped from the history books by a girl who doesn't know how she’ll fit into them. There was one like her before, who dug her palms into the rails and stared out at her burning Versailles, and she wondered how it could be so cold when there was so much light. Another kisses her daughter and son’s shining cheeks goodnight, sits on the tiled floor of the kitchen with her head in the oven. There was the one who painted and broke, loved and broke, painted and loved and shattered and broke. The other flies all her life and goes down at Howland, sinks for its remainder. All of them, statues with shards of rose colored glass transfixed in their eyeball sockets.

Maybe we were made to be romantic and lovely and tragic. Maybe we have no choice but to carry these diamonds and bleed from the backs of our ankles, streak the pavement rose red. Maybe we were destined to scar everything we touch, for what is beauty without pain?

I’ll paint my nails and bite them to the beds, I’ll **** boys who are cruel by design. I’ll spin endless corpses, spin relentless circles in this frigid corner of mine.

---TRIGGER WARNING: themes and references related to self harm---

I swear to god,
I'm the 13th reincarnation of Sylvia Plath,
Only I'm bad at poetry.
I write, I hide in my bedroom with the light off,
And I grow a little more absurd everyday.
One moment I'm singing a gentle song,
Nurturing the sweet daisies sprouted in my carpet.
A minute later I'm slicing open my forearms,
Cackling and painting something on the walls in blood.
Call 911 and shove the phone down my throat,
It feels good to gargle disappointment.

My writing has evolved over the years:
From naive, soft, and shallow murmurs,
To a steady, dull hum,
Then a defiant yell of a freedom.
However, it's time to enter another stage.
One of scratching, beating to the rhythm of a feverish dance.
It's tainted at the corners like an old, ruined photograph,
With a faint sour smell.
The final stage of my writing has come -
A frantic, hallowed, and rusty wail.
How long until the words I scrawl
Become nonsense?

So stay away,
Don't come through the crack in the bell jar.
Please, I'm trying to suffocate myself,
All in the name of art.
Let me stay in this vaccum of madness,
Pushing and pulling at my mind.
I'm telling you, it's going to hurt if you get too close.
My turbulent muse is ready with a match,
And I don't have the strength to stop her from burning you.

Let me revel in my obsession for a little longer.
My selfishness, my self-indulgence, my depravity,
Or whatever the hell you want to call it.
I know I'm a fool for wearing Plath's wedding band,
And swallowing her barbiturates.
I can't help but romanticize her legacy,
Writing her initials on Wernicke's and Broca's foreheads.
I don't care if I'm a copycat.

The first thing I see
when I pull out the top drawer
was the diagnosis. Meds, there you go

it pretty much said that.
I wondered about all the
creative people doing
some remarkable things,
creating and being alive.

Except they all one day
killed themselves.
Van Gogh stood in
the overgrown field before
he shot himself.
Sylvia Plath knelt down
and stuck her head in the oven.
Virginia Woolf grazed the smooth
peebles, thinking about what
she would write about those peebles,
Only to shove them in
her pockets and drown in the Ouse river.

Nearly everyday, I tell myself
I want to be a writer, or an artist-
Both, actually. That’s all I ever
wanted to be, but the fear of
spiraling, and becoming them
Is deeply disturbing.

Yet, I craved for this life,
To paint, and create stories
with a dash of madness
They all did likewise.

Each dull wheeze
— half-glass-filling lungs, tarred —
records my moments
like reel-to-reel tape
And the heart is a quivering branch
If not a paperweight
Pinning will and testament to the
desk

That plastic wine “glass”
turned out
to be
glass after all
My woman throws me punches
with the gentle touch
— all the virility —
of a little, lonely, old man
feeding bread
to ducks
Then goes to work on the meat of her hand
with the glass
Damages the nerves in her thumb
   tussle ensues
My arms are covered in blood
That two-penny copper smell

sister’s fella has anger issues
and wants a straightener
Tells me I need a job —
Is this not work?
If I had Molly’s blessing
I’d go to work on this *******
But she’s crying
And begs me not to
Begs him to calm down
I wanted to widow her
Her
And my bleeding wife