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
