Soirée

The heat swelters,
but that might be only
inside my own self.
I feel bothered—
perhaps to an unreasonable degree—
by the gray haze that hovers between me and the sky.
I strain to see the stars.
Above us,
the Dipper looms large and low,
clouded by the smoke and unheeded
by the revelers.
Thousands upon thousands, they come,
with red-round faces
and sweating hands.
By the light of a hundred smoky torches,
they drink and get drunk.
The noise of their squalid laughter
spreads over the hillsides like a milk-filled ocean,
pulsing with the drumbeats
that sway and steady and change tempo without notice.
Dancers are faint by the firelight—
I think, perhaps, that they dance for their own pleasure alone,
but the eyes of many are on the half-naked, writhing bodies
and their indistinct shadow-forms.
My shadow is the longest,
for I stand farthest from the fire,
burning from the inside
and swaying slightly with my empty cup.
A thousand strangers and a throbbing drum—
if I had a cool place to sit in the dark corners,
and I could see the yellow stars,
I might—just possibly—
fall asleep peacefully.

Sudden Episode

It began with that story
The Place Promised in Our Early Days
and it kept going into that song
It got into me and it's in me now
and somehow together they turned on
It's like a switch flipped on inside my body
I saw the tiny piece of metal on the floor
and I picked it up
and held it in my hand
Then I slipped off my slippers
How could I go outside unless my feet were free
to feel the world through their soles?
I could barely articulate
I mumbled
a reason why I had to go
out
and I felt the prickles of the rubber welcome mat
and the tiny pieces of sand on the cement
Every single piece of sand!
The moon was there,
large and full and veiled by wispy clouds
There was no one
Emptiness surrounded me
The moon was reflected in a puddle, and I watched
and I blew the white seeds of a dandelion into it
and when they would not blow off, I tore them off with my fingers
and tossed them into the air,
but alas! there was no wind to carry them
and suddenly I was left
with a corpse in my hands,
and I could feel the cold, wet life of it on the skin of my fingertips
and a shudder ran through me
I died!
almost
Everything in the world
is driving me toward this one point
where I will die
My body is restless, driven in some direction
but I do not know which direction that may be
And suddenly I realize
there is no one that I care about
and nothing that I must do
All that is important is this feeling
I ran
Then there was glass in my feet
I cried out
I could feel the pendant hanging between my breasts
and I wanted to nurse the world
I stopped and could no longer look at the moon
How is it that the world does not realize
that which is extraordinary in it?
How can it be that we are not
worthy of the extraordinary in us?

When I came inside
I chose not to hide it
For the first time, when someone asked
I answered truthfully
I took her outside to show her
the moon, and the emptiness, and how there was no one else in the world
And she did not feel it with me
but she knows how it feels
to walk down a road
and wish that it led out of town,
to know that if you could just change that one thing that's holding you back,
you could run and run and get there!
She left soon after,
but not with any cruelty in her heart and I knew
that it was good that I had told her
and that she was not frightened very much

I am looking, searching
and there are too many directions for me to go
I can feel everything here
and typing is a distraction
as the soft plastic of the keyboard
caresses my skin and teases my body
but I must go on because
there is someone out there
whom I must find.

Again

This
unbearable sadness
and I don't know why
and
all I want is relief
from the way
my body aches
and
I can't allow
myself
to
think
I fear
the force behind
that I'm holding
back
I long for
cessation
and I want to
hide
but I
mustn't.

To Four Tempting Children

To Ingemar

I want you, child, for my own.
You are fascinating to me.
I want to listen to your nonsensical speech
and encourage you in it.

I want to talk to you and know
that we are two of one kind,
that the things we say to each other
are understood by us and nobody else.
I want to show you the mysteries that haunt me
and ask your opinion.
I want to share with you the music I have found
and know your mind.
We speak the same language.

The kind of person we are
is obvious from even a very young age.
We are rare,
and we are lonely,
and we are happier in our equivalence
than we would ever be in any romance.

I love you more and understand you better
than do your parents.
Therefore,
you ought to be mine.

To a Girl with an Unreasonable Mother

You did nothing wrong!
I want to tell you,
although it isn't true--
you disobeyed your mother.
But the greater wrong was hers.

I would be a better mother than is your mother.
I can be reasonable, and
I am always just.

The activity she forbade you
is one that all children do,
and it's normal, and it's safe,
and it's the sort of unhealthy that will make you grow up strong.
And she oughtn't to have scolded you so.

I could see the pain in your face,
although you did not cry.
See? You are already strong.

To an Amish Child

Beautiful quiet girl,
what wonders have your large brown eyes not seen?
Let it be that I may take you
all the places I have loved.

When the whispering evil creeps in among the good,
I will protect you
as well as anyone can.
But evil lurks in every place,
and you must learn to face it on your own.

To a Beaming Toddler

You laughed,
and the world was renewed.
Your cheeks and hair and teeth
are all perfect.
There is no just or semi-just reason
why you should be mine,
except that I want you.

I want all beautiful things.
I want to fill my castle with them,
so I can delight in them whenever I desire--
the voices of the boy sopranos echoing in the stone corridors,
the grinning, smudged faces of the stable boys,
and you,
little terror, little princess.

It may be that you will grow up
to be the most brutal, vulgar evil that the world has known,
but I do not care because
now you are beautiful.

ERDE

A moment ago it fell upon me--
a single word that means,
for this moment,
the Eternity, the All.

And I have thrust it into me and spoken its name,
and through me, it resounds in heavy low reverberations.

Erde.

Inside my body, I can hear it ring
in strong Wagnerian tetrachords,
but out of my mouth, when it comes,
it is weak and shallow.

"Erde!"

I cry out again and again,
trying to capture the depth of it.
No, I am not capable--
and I may never be.

Why am I given to know, to perceive,
that which I cannot recreate?

Planning

Planning is the best part.
It reminds you that you have control.

No thing is as wonderful as your imagination suggested,
so if you must suffer through the hours of disappointment,
why not take the pleasure of the Plan?

The boredom of a party is the price you pay
For the hours of playful freedom you spend with the menu.

The humiliation of a wedding is worth more—
at least six months of monograms and plane tickets.

A baby isn’t half the fun its name is;
the same principle applies to travel, to husbands, to careers.

You know it doesn’t really matter if you follow the Plan—
the Plan exists only for the joy of its creation—
Stay home from the wedding and make more Plans.

And since you’ve planned every event in your life,
why not plan your death?

Lay it out in inky rows
on the clean white paper.
Tie up all the strings that dangle
around the neat brown package.

You know… you have no obligation to follow the Plan…

Thanks

I was saved

by the gray-brown bark
the flowing water on the rock,
and the face-warming sunlight.

And though I sit now with frozen, clumsy hands,
and read and understand the words of Sylvia Plath,
I am not in danger,

for you are with me.

And though I had it planned in detail that would please the most noble eye
and said no word and thought of nothing else that morning,
by afternoon I was saved.

May this holy remedy never lose its potency for me.

I have sampled it again
and it has gone a good way toward healing

A pleasant warmth!

I wish to thank
the sun, the moon,
and the Prime Mover.

Incompletion

I cannot finish anything,
So it does not matter if my beginnings are good.
I must finish something before I die,
Or my life, which had so much potential, will be meaningless.
The tremors in my body make me fear
That such a time may come very soon.
The future is indistinct and colorless—
Nothing is there.
I want to cry out with frustration,
But I have no strength.

I fear to wait,
But perhaps tomorrow...

Summer Afternoon

It is the first day of summer.
The sun is a heavy, thick quilt
That lies over the world to keep out the morning’s noise.
Tiny violets peek unassumingly out from the ivy.
The branches of the trees are free;
They laugh again as they stretch toward the sky.
People have come out to sit on the quickened, vibrant grass,
And the wind is a gentle lady.

Why can I think only
Of my own death?

Warmth

I stand outside, and it is warm,
And I feel power moving through
The sturdy weapons—strong—my hands.
I have completed all my chores,
And it feels good to start anew.
The sunshine’s brilliance of demands
Into my eyelids fiercely pours.
I look toward it, take the pain:
Its warmth is floating, and it lands
Upon my face and draws outdoors
The secrets that we all contain.
And I feel power moving in
My sturdy arms, as strong as wars
That scrape the earth with each campaign.
I have completed all within,
And it feels good to be fulfilled.
The air is warm as sugarcane.
I want to follow and begin
To be outside and then to build.
I look toward the sun and feel
The pain that signals mortal sin.
Inside, my warden, hushed and stilled,
Pulls closed the curtains to conceal
The outside power rushing by.
No one knows what is instilled
By nature in my heartless mind.
There is not one who fathoms why.
Then something stirs inside my frame,
And I feel earth all intertwined,
And I feel power moving by
My sturdy back, my steady name.
Forever I desire that warmth.

Hunger

I know what it means to be HUNGRY.
It seeps up from your stomach and gets into your brain
And then you can’t think.
Your eyes go sideways and the lights buzz buzz buzz into them.
Soon you don’t know what it is that you are missing.
You just feel heavier, heavier, heavier as you stop moving.
You go on,
Because you’re stronger than this,
And because you want to know what the next stage will feel like.
When you finally eat,
Food doesn’t taste, it just goes in so so so fast.
But imagine if,
No matter how much you ate,
You still kept on being hungry,
Being hungrier and hungrier,
Eyes getting fuzzier and fuzzier,
Breath getting shorter and less efficient—
Imagine this, and you will know
How I feel
Every moment of my life.

Hypersensitivity

I tremble at my own cold fingers as they scrape my scalp.
My hair is soft and coarse and lifted;
The curls have chopped-off ends.
Rape! and Chaos!
These things loom over me like the water that masses above the skies.
Why shouldn’t it be true?
Stranger things are believed by all.
When the icy fingers trace my breasts I shudder.
In fear?
But I am sure there is evil in every place.

Mine

He is not mine and I am ashamed.
I have made him me and it is beautiful.
When the meaningless babble of rhythmic text bounces out,
I cling to him fiercely and he does not drown.

I lap up possessively the blood on his neck.
I snap angrily at the men with their teeth.
How could you hurt him? He is no honorable foe.
He is not mine, but I have made him so.

Hypergraphia

I write because I must.
I will bleed all over the shattered window and I will laugh.
Sordid is a wonderful word.

Endless Longing

I have eaten all the ideas and we are one,
Though I sometimes disagree.
They are in my stomach and soon they will overcome me,
And I will burst through the window.
With broken glass in my heart,
I will fly forward and,
I hope, die
Endless longing, he says—
That is the Truth.
I cannot for much longer stand;
Existence is more or less pain.
And hearing these Truths wells up in me tears
Lacrymosa!
For to me, they are immediately meaningful,
Obviously True.
This insight requires no words.
How will I ever put it into a language and convince the nonbelievers?
If they can’t sense it instinctively,
Can they sense it at all?
Oh, I know I access the Sublime!
At times I have wondered if I were really
Not the same,
But now I know I am not the same!
Because today, someone did not understand the difference
Between beauty and SUBLIME
Between sensibility and METAPHYSICS
Between joy and JOY—
But these things to me are indisputable.
They resound in me with honest Disinterest for Art
ART is my RELIGION.
Ach, I can see and laugh at bias even when it is my own.
Endless longing, he says—
How does he know me?

Ultraviolet

The world weighs heavy down upon me,
And like a pendant hangs above my breasts
To pull my head beneath the desert,
To take the shimmered sky-view from my eyes.

And what I fear to say aloud is
That there is no poetic license here.
No gloomy metaphor is whispered,
But Truth unvarnished I give quickly.

And all the Truth that I distinguish
Shall come through my own senses to my mind,
And all the Truth that IS immortal—
To it I am as blind as I am deaf.

Reality’s reality is
That I see with a different kind of eye,
A little like the bee that searches
The colors ultraviolet for fare.

And though there once were others like me,
I cannot find them in my present place,
And like the vestiges of their thoughts,
Which have revealed to me myself at times,

My only hope now is to help one
To understand as I have learned to do,
To meet that one and say in wonder,
With questions spent: I know we are the same.

Our foreheads touch as we draw nearer.
No bashful love have we, nor fond ideals,
But knowledge, wrapped in shrouding sin-stains—
And this is from the words that I must choose.

My words must be so pure and vibrant
So as to show to him himself revealed.
We back to back will feel each other
As we approach the world from different sides.

Hunger Incarnate

It is the second sunny day
and I want to go OUT—
but I have nowhere to go.

My rooms make up a cage
that has held me all winter,
and for the first time in ages,
I’ve been allowed to open the windows.

The wisps of breeze that come through
have woken my numb heart.
Whereas before I was content to remain,
now I am discontent.

Whispers of Yeats whip in with the windows.
The order of words matters more than mere meaning.
And I—
I am hunger incarnate.

The world is so beautiful,
and I pretend to hope to be worthy of it.

I lie on the floor.
The carpet smells of cat food and borscht.
It’s strange that I’ve never noticed that before.

Distended thoughts mix indiscriminately
as I feel jealousy for the voices outside.
I wish I had business there,
a reason to escape this tepid aviary.

And as yet, the desire in my abdomen is so strong
that I fear it will consume me.
Must I live forever in this world,
where everything stirs up in me
the longing for greatness, for excitement?
Must I live with this hunger,
this void that strains to devour everything
and is never satisfied?

How long must I wait?
Come to me, Adventure! Or
Come to me, Death!

Responsibility

I know.

It's irresponsible of me.

I ought to get help,
find someone to fix this for me.

Or I ought to soldier on,
knowing that perseverence brings honor.

This is my problem. I should take care of it.
Everybody has problems,
but everybody has to face the world.

I ought to seize my destiny;
I ought to assume responsibility.

Instead...

How about if I give up,
and the rest of you ignore me?

How about if I withdraw completely
and hand over my duties to someone else?

How about if I dissolve all obligation,
so that I no longer have promises to break?

What I Want

What I want most of all
is for the world to accept that I am going home for a nap.

What I want more than anything,
even more than I want to sleep,
is a reprieve from life.

Life is stronger than I am.
The day is longer than I can stay awake.
Work is a high wave of blunt objects to bash my head.

I am almost in tears
for no reason at all
except that eleven hours of sleep
weren't enough,
and that I'm hungry
but no food has any taste
and that the pain in my stomach
is good because it is an expression
of the pain in my heart.

There is pain in my neck and shoulders, too,
but when I try to release the tension,
I grow faint
I am breathless, my head spins
There is a weight behind my eyes
that makes them dull and sluggish.
I want to put something in my mouth,
curl up,
close my eyes,
and suck until I fall asleep.

There is too much pretending here,
trying to respond to jokes in kind
and ending with nothing but nervous laughter,
smiling with too much giddiness,
speaking with too much brightness.

I simulate mania.

It would be selfish and unkind of me
to tell others about this mood--
it just makes them uncomfortable and unsure.

So, I pretend to be happy, friendly, normal, sincere.

What I want more than anything else in the world
is to be manic.
And if I'll never feel that way again,
I'd rather die.

I do not dare ask God
to grant my wish.
I know that justice demands retribution,
that there must be balance,
that I must pay for the ecstasy
with utter despair.

What I want is
to stop
wanting.

To Joseph Berglinger

I ever loved you, and I love in vain,
Yet knowing you will not return my love,
And I would not for any man refrain
From love and the futility thereof.

Your thoughts and aspirations give me hope;
They hail the evening when the stars awake.
You are the Art, the Truth’s romantic scope.
You are emotion, and like me, you ache.

And when I realized you are contrived,
My hopes were dashed to think you were not you.
Perhaps no one like you are could have thrived.
My solace—that a soul imagined you.

Like me, he wrote of bright, unmingled Truth
As if my aching spirit he foresaw.
But of course, he died in untried youth,
As do all men, it seems, who earn my awe.