You can try, try, try.
Third time's a ******* joke, man.
Don't even bother.

You steal your thoughts
From memories never lived
Hoping that terror will hide
In a whisky filled teacup

It's the 1 a.m blues again
(Everything is burning
Everything is burning
Everything is burning)
And your friends pretend happiness
By feigning death and snoring.

You did not sign up for this, you know,
Not the cold nor the bit of blood
From the lip you cut too hard
But you've got it, anyway,
So you may as well ****
But everyone who'd touch you is gone,
Looking to love and not simply make it

You cannot think what then you were

Now it's morning
Go to church, eat a sermon
The leaves are crackling in the wind
And your Sunday is cried away at the pews
Breadcrumbs burning your ears
A poet can bleed, they say,
If his ears are torn up with words enough

Now it's night again and you're trying
"Beloved", you say. The mirror does not reply
"Beautiful", you say. The mirror does not reply
"Broken", you say. The lights go out
Now you can go to bed
With your eyes open
Waiting for sleep to say
"How do you do? Let's hold each other forever."

Was it not I
Who tried to die
Nine
Lives
Three are spent
And here I lie
My third grave.
I fell slave to love
To behave
Elocution by electrocution-
See my eyes
Touch my hair
I may breathe men for air
But mine eyes
Have seen the light
To the unenvyable cry
Of my plight
Slight of hand;
What a trick it is to die.
Maggots feast upon my eyes,
I would've rather burnt:
Little jew, little jew
What has Herr Doktor done to you
Chimney stacks
Bellow black;
I do not do
I do not do
The black shoe
I've been living in
For nearly two years of suffering
My ailing mind
Blind to happiness.
deranged:
A form of estranged from reality.
For now I fly
High as a vulture
Hung in the sky,
The Zoroastrian carcass
Beneath my circle;
i cannot die,
Without that vulture
A phoenix become
As bright as the Sun
And I will never die
Cheated of six lives
it is not fair
so yes
i eat men like air.

"Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus, adhering to rules, to rules, to rules."

Baptized once again at 31
you were dressed in an apron of glory
purple-inked and gas-filled
a ******* carved inside your head

Withering in the basement at the age of 10
you took the blade as a best friend
a walking miracle, a providence
you were a tempest of silent wails

Ariel has made a banshee out of you
the world is going up in a shriek
but your head never went with it
an epoch later; you're in holy flames

A golden lotus crescendos in the ground
stripped of the chance to see your Ariel grow
the bell jar is inhabited by some
my patriotism has been ablaze

O' American Isis
I grant you now the discretion you desired
you don't have to adhere to rules anymore

*The universe is coming by your side

I have been seeking a moment when
My paean would see the light
A melody when your serrated laugh
Crescendoes and obviates all evils
But what I'm truly wishing for
Is to be a scabbard to your sword
The bell that wakes you up at noon
A hymn that you know by heart
And the rituals that you adhere to
Tell me how I could shield
The furtive rhythm of your chords
To venerate the echoes of your fingertips
And be completely absorbed in your silhouette
I am proclaiming my paean
That seems five months of age
But in fact it has been decades
Trapped amongst verses and rhymes
If Hemingway was exchanging breaths
You could be his martini glass
Or the obsession of Shelley with Keats
Or maybe a beer bottle on Hank's grave
But the golden lotus has been outdated
For you are my fierce flames
To sanctify and to revive
And unlike Plath I'm living to see
When my paean would come to life



I close my eyes; the whole world has just ended -
the slough of despond within has crawled back to the surface, unintended.
Although thine own mind & heart be desolate, sinking and painful,
still I do not cry - but wait for my quietus; an act most baneful.

Mozart,
deaf,
died, eventually.

Picasso, pervert, died; Whitney, Winehouse, drugs, dead; Elvis, Methamphetamine, died

(on the toilet).

Van Gogh,
missing an earlobe,
died.

Plath,
head in an oven,
in front of her kids,
Woolf
Patron saint of insanity, I guess
waded into a river and-

River. River Phoenix. Drugs.

Natalie Merchant wrote that song about him in 1995.

Flash forward.
Me, twenty-one, drunk.
Proprietor of a collection of lackluster poems.
Sold their small, nonbinary soul to the Devil
in exchange for a fortune,
gone.

I sit with Sylvia Plath
open.

Thunder tears my ideas
with the rip sound of newspaper.
It rains a cold shower
lit only by Hollywood B-grade lightning flashes.

Old spouting overflows. Waters spill;
a forgotten bath with taps left on.

Winds tug at washing that’s pegged tight. They
tangle soaked sheets around the line with
noisy bluster.

I sit with Sylvia Plath
open.

Listening to her voice?