Ten Years Ago...

 

Ten years ago

He came

On a September morning

Into our lives

You cried and reached for me

Years churn and time collapses

Into unknown questions

Of disbelief

Ten years ago

 

 

Tyrant...

 

Inside my head

Lives a tyrant

With a voice of impeccable violence

Seductive and sweet

Consoling and cutting

Deceptive and cunning

In the mire of reality

What is real or an illusion?

The line between happiness and a tear is microscopic

The tyrant questions my good days

Are the days of lucidity an abnormality or a gift

Maybe a curse

To remember when in the valley of desolation

Of what fleetingly passed by my senses

As a life possible and true

It all seems to fade now

Falling away into mist

Disappearing

Time tyrant

Revenge

 

 

For the Year of the Insane ~ Anne Sexton

 

A prayer

 

O Mary, fragile mother,

hear me, hear me now

although I do not know your words.

The black rosary with its silver Christ

lies unblessed in my hand

for I am the unbeliever.

Each bead is round and hard between my fingers,

a small black angel.

O Mary, permit me this grace,

this crossing over,

although I am ugly,

submerged in my own past

and my own madness.

Although there are chairs

I lie on the floor.

Only my hands are alive,

touching beads.

Word for word, I stumble.

A beginner, I feel your mouth touch mine.

 

I count beads as waves,

hammering in upon me.

I am ill at their numbers,

sick, sick in the summer heat

and the window above me

is my only listener, my awkward being.

She is a large taker, a soother.

The giver of breath

she murmurs,

exhaling her wide lung like an enormous fish.

 

Closer and closer

comes the hour of my death

as I rearrange my face, grow back,

grow undeveloped and straight-haired.

All this is death.

In the mind there is a thin alley called death

and I move through it as

through water.

My body is useless.

It lies, curled like a dog on the carpet.

It has given up.

There are no words here except the half-learned,

the Hail Mary and the full of grace.

Now I have entered the year without words.

I note the queer entrance and the exact voltage.

Without words they exist.

Without words on my touch bread

and be handed bread

and make no sound.

 

O Mary, tender physician,

come with powders and herbs

for I am in the center.

It is very small and the air is gray

as in a steam house.

I am handed wine as a child is handed milk.

It is presented in a delicate glass

with a round bowl and a thin lip.

The wine itself is pitch-colored, musty and secret.

The glass rises in its own toward my mouth

and I notice this and understand this

only because it has happened.

 

I have this fear of coughing

but I do not speak,

a fear of rain, a fear of the horseman

who comes riding into my mouth.

The glass tilts in on its own

and I amon fire.

I see two thin streaks burn down my chin.

I see myself as one would see another.

I have been cut int two.

 

O Mary, open your eyelids.

I am in the domain of silence,

the kingdom of the crazy and the sleeper.

There is blood here.

and I haven't eaten it.

O mother of the womb,

did I come for blood alone?

O little mother,

I am in my own mind.

I am locked in the wrong house.

 

 

Wasted Time...

 

“And the hours go by like minutes and the shadows come to stay

So you take a little something to make them go away

And I could have done so many things, baby

If I could only stop my mind from wonderin' what

I left behind and from worrying 'bout this wasted time…”

 

 

 

(Music: The Eagles ~ Wasted Time)

 

 

 

 More Than Myself ~ Anne Sexton

 

Not that it was beautiful,

but that, in the end, there was

a certain sense of order there;

something worth learning

in that narrow diary of my mind,

in the commonplaces of the asylum

where the cracked mirror

or my own selfish death

outstared me . . .

I tapped my own head;

it was glass, an inverted bowl.

It's small thing

to rage inside your own bowl.

At first it was private.

Then it was more than myself.

 

 



Prism...

 

My pupils constrict in sunlight

Like time slipping through lost words

 

Another day

Another night

Another forgotten trip around the sun

 

Combination of pills to hopefully take away the ache

Dancing with the chemicals

My mind waltzes to a melancholy tune

Until exhaustion sets in

 

Same place

Each day a return to indecision

And ghoulish thoughts

 

The lost words scattered on forgotten shores in time

Like my sight refracted through a prism of pain

 

 

The Dead Heart by Anne Sexton...

 

"The tongue, the Chinese say,

is like a sharp knife:

it kills

without drawing blood. "

~ Anne Sexton

 

 

 

It is not a turtle

hiding in its little green shell.

It is not a stone

to pick up and put under your black wing.

It is not a subway car that is obsolete.

It is not a lump of coal that you could light.

It is a dead heart.

It is inside of me.

It is a stranger

yet once it was agreeable,

opening and closing like a clam.

 

What it has cost me you can’t imagine,

shrinks, priests, lovers, children, husbands,

friends and all the lot.

An expensive thing it was to keep going.

It gave back too.

Don’t deny it!

I half wonder if April would bring it back to life?

A tulip? The first bud?

But those are just musings on my part,

the pity one has when one looks at a cadaver.

 

How did it die?

I called it EVIL.

I said to it, your poems stink like vomit.

I didn’t stay to hear the last sentence.

It died on the word EVIL.

It did it with my tongue.

The tongue, the Chinese say,

is like a sharp knife:

it kills

without drawing blood.

 

 

Dreams...

 

Empty is the poet

The words have withered like the lepers hand

 Exhausted by stilted hope

Stifled in loneliness and ennui

Beyond now is forever

And before forever was yesterday

Winter comes when summer dies

And snow buries dreams

In cold dark caverns

Over which

The poet walks wrapped in scarf and wool

Reciting under frozen breath ~ The Hollow Men

Only these words audible

“Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow…”

 

 

Stone...

 

Sitting like a stone on driftwood

While waves of emotion and water fall over me

And the northeast wind blows over the sea

Blinding biting gale of derision

 

 

Chilled splashing breakers turn to ice in the air

In solidarity with my frigid soul

Stone frozen to driftwood

Memories frozen to pain

 

Stone on driftwood

Reflecting ~ Ink on skin

Words on paper

Remembering ~ Kiss on lips

 

Closing my eyes

I see death

Cold as ice and stiff as stony wood

On the hard broken shoreline

 

 

Father of Lies...

 

Opening her mouth poison oozes like aerosol

Lies spray the room and ricochet through minds and hearts

Stealing life from souls

Killing truth from innocence

Destroying relationships and desecrating vows

 

From your lips

Conceit

Deception

Blame

Accusations

 

And lies like your father ~ the Enemy

You have mastered speaking his native language

 In exchange for love and truth

Sad and sorry I am for you

Twisted and tangled in sin with death at the door

With each passing moment

 

Life disappears

 

Abundant life sails out into the horizon and soon evaporates

Beauty turns ugly and hollow

Selling birthright is never pleasant and consequences linger

Justice will be led to victory

Note: allusions from John 8:44 and Matthew 12:20 and John 10:10

 

 

Desert...

 

So many winding and meandering paths

Lost on the warm sands of the desert

Chasing mirages

Where did I turn in the wrong direction?

Is there even such a thing?

(a wrong direction in a desert)

Rivers flow

Clocks tick

Sand blows

People huddle in the space

Between the disconcerting night

And the break of dawn

We pray for someday to arrive in Her yellow splendor

To wash away the anguish of the years

The dust of travel

From between our toes

Until then

We live with the debilitating ache of soul vertigo

Quelled by the touch of friends

With loves’ silent smile

Knowing She will come in her tangerine beauty

To warm cold bodies

In the east Her eyes will shine over the horizon

Slicing the darkness like a knife

Wielding her glory

To breathe life anew into deaths dark night

Mortals born once more to journey onward

In Her radiance

 

 

Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath…

 

I have done it again.

One year in every ten

I manage it--

 

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,

My right foot

 

A paperweight,

My face featureless, fine

Jew linen.

 

Peel off the napkin

O my enemy.

Do I terrify?--

 

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?

The sour breath

Will vanish in a day.

 

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be

At home on me

 

And I a smiling woman.

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

 

This is Number Three.

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

 

What a million filaments.

The peanut-crunching crowd

Shoves in to see

 

Them unwrap me hand and foot--

The big strip tease.

Gentlemen, ladies

 

These are my hands

My knees.

I may be skin and bone,

 

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

The first time it happened I was ten.

It was an accident.

 

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.

I rocked shut

 

As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

 

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

 

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I've a call.

 

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.

It's easy enough to do it and stay put.

It's the theatrical

 

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute

Amused shout:

 

'A miracle!'

That knocks me out.

There is a charge

 

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

For the hearing of my heart--

It really goes.

 

And there is a charge, a very large charge

For a word or a touch

Or a bit of blood

 

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

So, so, Herr Doktor.

So, Herr Enemy.

 

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,

The pure gold baby

 

That melts to a shriek.

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

 

Ash, ash--

You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--

 

A cake of soap,

A wedding ring,

A gold filling.

 

Herr god, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

 

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.