It's a trainwreck, would you like to see?

buttersidownbuttersidown Posts: 7
edited April 2004 in Poetry, Prose, Music & Art
04/22/04

And to my Father, I become another listless daughter soaking up the Son like a gray dwarf, like a pea pod, like all those things that hold magic in their seams. And to my father, I become that to believe, to love and to hold and to sweep up shrieking when the tide comes in. And to my father, my father, weak and sure, weak and binding me in his gray faith of universal proof, theorems really, touting that We Are All Already Dead so…, why worry?

We are all already dead. We are worm food. We are dirt. We are dust. And we are condensation.

Raise the blade to your own throat and get whatever it is you’re getting over, over with. Kill yourself and with a paintbrush splay the blood up on a billboard for everyone to see. Because everyone who sees will agree that you never understated anything worth stating in the first place (although they might say, although they probably will say…. “well… she always did ten-gallon-hat God“).

Love itself may be nobody’s martyr, but all of us martyr love just as plain as Jesus mothered sin. So… yeah… I’ll climb up onto that precipitous platform. And I’ll cry a raccoon’s mask onto the cake my face is made of…. and I’ll slip my ankles toward the sky and let the platinum dye-job drip like new soft wheat toward the new soft ground broken… and hide my smile while you take my picture. Then we’ll go get a cheeseburger and fries and everyone will wonder why I’m all dressed up. And after that? After that, we’ll go watch water snakes glide through their boxed abyss, and we’ll hum tunes into each other’s ears, and we’ll hum tunes into the very centers of each other, and we’ll drift off… the tragedy thwarted once more, the new day’s pump now primed, now sure.

And in dreaming I’ll wish I had the ability to split myself into two. Then she and I, we’d sneak out in the darkest part of night and scale back up the ladder to the billboard, the platform. That flat perpendicular to everything larger than life. And one of us would have remembered the knife. We’d draw platinum blonde straws, the shortest one winning, the shortest one falling gently to the iron bars, calling her sister come, come bury the knife. Bounding, slicing skin to ribbons in lip-locked grace. Going, their passion finally a communion, chalised in gold and an always-green blue.

And then the long one? The loser? The long loser would laugh out loud, drenched to puddles in red because she’d finally be Everything that her Father’d said. She’d be dead. Dead by her own hand and not by the Marlborough malaise that her everyday life had become. And, oh my God, would she dance in the rain of her sister’s blood?

And
to their father,
their father,
weak and sure and binding…
she’d become…
she’d become…

a raving lunatic
the chess match done.
Post edited by Unknown User on

Comments

  • The day you died I went into the dirt,
    Into the lightless hibernaculum
    Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard
    Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.
    It was good for twenty years, that wintering -
    As if you never existed, as if I came
    God-fathered into the world from my mother's belly:
    Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity.
    I had nothing to do with guilt or anything
    When I wormed back under my mother's heart.

    Small as a doll in my dress of innocence
    I lay dreaming your epic, image by image.
    Nobody died or withered on that stage.
    Everything took place in a durable whiteness.
    The day I woke, I woke on Churchyard Hill.
    I found your name, I found your bones and all
    Enlisted in a cramped stone askew by an iron fence.

    In this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead
    Crowd foot to foot, head to head, no flower
    Breaks the soil. This is Azalea path.
    A field of burdock opens to the south.
    Six feet of yellow gravel cover you.
    The artificial red sage does not stir
    In the basket of plastic evergreens they put
    At the headstone next to yours, nor does it rot,
    Although the rains dissolve a bloody dye:
    The ersatz petals drip, and they drip red.

    Another kind of redness bothers me:
    The day your slack sail drank my sister's breath
    The flat sea purpled like that evil cloth
    My mother unrolled at your last homecoming.
    I borrow the silts of an old tragedy.
    The truth is, one late October, at my birth-cry
    A scorpion stung its head, an ill-starred thing;
    My mother dreamed you face down in the sea.

    The stony actors poise and pause for breath.
    I brought my love to bear, and then you died.
    It was the gangrene ate you to the bone
    My mother said: you died like any man.
    How shall I age into that state of mind?
    I am the ghost of an infamous suicide,
    My own blue razor rusting at my throat.
    O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at
    Your gate, father - your hound-bitch, daughter, friend.
    It was my love that did us both to death.
  • DopeBeastieDopeBeastie Posts: 2,513
    holy god that rocks

    i still need to get some plath...
  • setaside2setaside2 Posts: 1,084
    indeed chess matches set with blade
    their games over before they're bade
    good day to you, sir, madam, take the spade
    we'll bury our bones, our love, our sensual shade
    take them all, packed up, paid.

    no burial at sea more than flotation
    the earth's edge serration rotation
    with all false, I say FALSE, martyrs preaching location, location, location

    sully the elocution of the thought
    bring about the execution and the sieving of the soul
    settle your anticipation and your burdened cot
    counter and demand and counter and parlay and counter and ripost
    the sword and defamation, the castration of the prostrate blindsided and sideswiped before the bowl.

    beckon with torn tears
    bring the hand in the come to me defiance
    salute, tap that blade to forehead,
    and begin your twin bladed enchant
    meant to prove and to bend
    to move and to rend
    to tear apart all who may satiate your fears

    and if your ferocity and your passion may be swayed by a pierced lung
    air escaping from two places and blood the one
    may your operatic cry splinter wood, crack the glass and send their minds reeling
    fractured and unknowing heatstroked in the ovening sun.

    there will lie the hero, the martyr,
    remains in pieces, in whole, upon the fertilized loam
    fossilization, mineralization, your face will turn to stone.
    may it be an opal that sets your eyes
    and may it be the gypsum that stole your breath
    and may the silver that flees your veins keep the werewolves at bay
    while within the last secret room within the heart, the sapphire is kept.

    strange how love appears so human when clad in armor while splayed in the shade of the waxing evening, leaking its innards into the mound

    I shall take up the sword, the shield, and tenderly foot this softening ground
    and one day I shall catch up to those who committed this act upon my love
    my blade shall flit and fly, my shield, my dove...

    one by one they will fall without a cry

    without sense, without fire

    and without a sound.

    Bound.
    I'm stepping in front of the gushing hydrant in a hurricane. I'd like to see the traction I keep.
  • coleencoleen Posts: 938
    who is you beauty? begs this beast
    you remind you remind you remind me
    of a brilliant fox that left our warm cozy fox hole
    billowing with pillows and dylan and wine
    he was charmed he was charmed he was
    charmed away from our precious den by the pied piper
    humming a mythical tune about cod pieces and ssshhhhhh.....
    and i wandered and i wondered and i followed
    best as best as best i could
    looking up at the sky above for traces of the comet's shimmering trail and to the horizon where his boldness bled into the mountains
    only i stumbled over what happened to be my heart on the ground
    gathering myself to myself i was gathering
    and being more careful and careless all at the same time
    only somehow my brilliant beauty i am missing you
    remembering to forget my way home
    listening to the melody lost in the snow
    and this secret
    our secret
    your secret
    is safest with me
  • setaside2setaside2 Posts: 1,084
    coleen:

    beautiful.

    and happy am i to see you, madam.


    buttersidedown.

    murphy's law intrinsic in your name, but I prefer to see the stuff on the floor as fiber intake.

    i believe in the five second rule.

    hmm?

    with love, seta

    p.s. of course, your pome was excellent.
    I'm stepping in front of the gushing hydrant in a hurricane. I'd like to see the traction I keep.
  • being double-tagged never felt so good, you guys, and I take certain delight in our community, our communion

    (may our beaded curtain always be see-through)

    home make a hot tub
    fill it with champaign
    climb in and dive under
    over and again
  • BuruBuru Posts: 8,473
    butterside - that was beautiful prose/poem

    and Fins, I love Plath - thanks for posting!

    Seta - great tagging
    y la banda de Guille... cuando toca?
  • Originally posted by setaside2
    indeed chess matches set with blade
    their games over before they're bade
    good day to you, sir, madam, take the spade
    we'll bury our bones, our love, our sensual shade
    take them all, packed up, paid.

    no burial at sea more than flotation
    the earth's edge serration rotation
    with all false, I say FALSE, martyrs preaching location, location, location

    sully the elocution of the thought
    bring about the execution and the sieving of the soul
    settle your anticipation and your burdened cot
    counter and demand and counter and parlay and counter and ripost
    the sword and defamation, the castration of the prostrate blindsided and sideswiped before the bowl.

    beckon with torn tears
    bring the hand in the come to me defiance
    salute, tap that blade to forehead,
    and begin your twin bladed enchant
    meant to prove and to bend
    to move and to rend
    to tear apart all who may satiate your fears

    and if your ferocity and your passion may be swayed by a pierced lung
    air escaping from two places and blood the one
    may your operatic cry splinter wood, crack the glass and send their minds reeling
    fractured and unknowing heatstroked in the ovening sun.

    there will lie the hero, the martyr,
    remains in pieces, in whole, upon the fertilized loam
    fossilization, mineralization, your face will turn to stone.
    may it be an opal that sets your eyes
    and may it be the gypsum that stole your breath
    and may the silver that flees your veins keep the werewolves at bay
    while within the last secret room within the heart, the sapphire is kept.

    strange how love appears so human when clad in armor while splayed in the shade of the waxing evening, leaking its innards into the mound

    I shall take up the sword, the shield, and tenderly foot this softening ground
    and one day I shall catch up to those who committed this act upon my love
    my blade shall flit and fly, my shield, my dove...

    one by one they will fall without a cry

    without sense, without fire

    and without a sound.

    Bound.

    i REALLY need to change my sig....
  • rubyruby Posts: 103
    I didn't know Sylvia Plath's father had committed suicide...
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