Subjectivia Killed Sylvia Plath

Subjectivia Killed Sylvia Plath


Dark and a winding staircase up to the powerhouse of my mind
I travel here from time to time, if the dark outside is equal to the dark behind my eyes

Some rooms I try easy with familiarity, open red spaces
but here there are lots and lots, lots and lots of places

Smart to be scared of wandering too far
because it’s easy to get lost when there’s always more

But never will I go as far as the time
I ventured with Sylvia Plath into the bowels of my mind.

The innocuous trip down a rattling stair to the basement, twist and find
Sylvia sifting through my secret junk from behind.

She unearths a treasure,
and holds it up to the light
An antiquated, black memory
She smiles, and reaches to put it in her dress
I panic.
“Sylvia, that’s mine!”

“Oh, you,” Sylvia says, haughty, my memory in hand,
“You want to throw this gem away.”
And she pockets it.
And begins to walk away.

It’s crusty and black, and yes,
I hid it down here to rot and hopefully die.
But it’s Sylvia Plath,
So I follow not too close behind, since
she scares me a little,
because her eyes are very bright, her lips very red, her movements a little volatile.

We go foraging, and I even think
she started to like me a little,
She kept going deeper
deeper
deeper
down,
till we were knee deep
In subjectivia.
The swirling, recess of everything
I would never need,
but had kept,
everything I had tried to throw away,
but had stayed.
Clamoring for attention, flip flop nausea.

Sylvia, Sylvia Plath, you’ll pull a lonely thing from the depths
and cling to it’s floating corpse.

Sylvia, Sylvia, don’t wait for life to co-create, to manifest
but crawl in the water-logged basement
on your knees and, hate!

Agitate!
Extrapolate!
And Plot! Plot! Plot!


The air was ashes, recycled
grievances.
The floor was mobile
sinking lower,
The fish that swam past
fed continuously on each other.

I turned away,
without a word,
But Sylvia noticed she was alone
nonetheless.

“Don’t you suffer?”
She held me by the hand.
Oh, she looked sad,
and I left her in that stifled land.

Sylvia, everyone suffers.
Sylvia, get off your high horse,
The High Horse of Subjectivia.
it will drown you in semantics
It will roll you past grief and rage
and you will flip like a doll
Sylvia, though you’re down so low
on that pain you’re riding high,
From there, everything you want,
is getting smaller, smaller, small.

I like the imagery and tone of it. The only thing is that it seems to flow rather inconsistently at times. Perhaps you should work on getting an even flow throughout. I do sense potential though. And God Bless Sylvia Plath.

you remember what I think of this one! ^_^

I agree, there are certain jerks and rifts in the rhythm-- that has a lot to do with me starting a certain rhyme/couplet pattern and then deviating from it because it was a hassle from what I wanted to say. I definitely will go back and toy with this later. I'm not sure if tinkering with poetry makes it better, even if you iron out kinks, cause then you can lose some of the juice. Even by trying too hard you lose the juice. I know mine is really uneven-- poetry is about energy and saying something with less words than more.

I do value showing it to others and seeing reactions.
thanks both of you

I actually like this. I sometimes write poetry in a similar style. Although perhaps its not considered a style, but I combine a mix of poetry and prose, I find it can work. I also enjoy non rhyming poetry too.

I do think you can `finish` poetry and I do sometimes write something and leave it for a few weeks without looking to re-read then tweak a bit here and there and then maybe go back to it again later. I would share this with you but I tend to switch the words about and then save over the top so don't have anything right now other than a few lines which I haven't and may not work on again.