Adrift

' I am too pure for you or anyone.
  Your body
  Hurts me as the world hurts God. '
     - Sylvia Plath

(1)
 
A candles credulosity
Cast away to repair
Tentacles of green
Airspray.
 
Salt of the earth
Eaten red, a blare
Sickens the heart of Mary.
 
I need not your abysmal
Tunnel of depravity deepening
Creeping on air,
Destitute;
Rising serpentine swath
Of indignant hair.
 
Silken wafer
Body of oneness,
Leave, leave ---
 
Break the surface  
To sink on a  
Pink gelatinous wave
Of sea-foam
Swallowing sustenance ---
 
To be, to be one; a ball
Adrift without
Cares.
 
(2)
 
A snuffed candle
Emerging birthcry
Stifled on air ---
A quickening of Jesus
Such flickering sin.
 
Holy water, I
Touched by purity
Lantern of delicacy
A garden of petticoats;
This weary life ---
 
Dragging its snare
Among the greenery
Taking me by force.
 
Robes of sorrow dragging
Multiplying emergences
From a pit of dullness
A fever; an ignorance,
An unknowing.
 
The blue one, the red one
Drifts by, drifts by
Encapsulating  
The murky tendrils
Of the blind eye.
 
A horizon ---
And the seas  
Meet the sky
A blue vastness cloaked
In a ruddy disguise.
 
(3)
 
When I died, did the world
Stand still,
Was there not an unnerving
Peace intribulate?
 
Did the candles  
Float and float and float
On a tiny sloshing sea
In a centerpiece?
 
Was my head on your wall,
My hair in your drawer,
Scented in eternity?
 
Did the dust on your mantle
Speak my name in grey
Incoherences, or did
The words fall away as
Weathered paint?
 
Was there humor in the thing,
a Comic-Mythology,
Did it burn as yellow-grass
Under a merciful lens in
A sun-drenched field?
 
A happiness calls
Like a voice in the wall.
 
Gilded child rocked in
Burgeoning placenta,
Red with doubt ---
 
Nevertheless,
Blind and
Given to shout
Burning  
Consuming air.
 
(4)
 
How, since day one they
All nodded in agreement,
Stony and still
Featureless.
 
Eyeing the fever
Administering the remedies
The muses in tandem
Floating their observances.
 
Oh, but how did they
Know I would carry on
In burning sentences
Of heat, light and smoke
A molten flickering flame, I.
 
Oh, but how did they not
Know my name but for a
Bald, erupting cry
Rising as nuclear ash.
 
How they came to me
Watching, watching,
Seeing me rise from a  
Hothouse of despair
As you stood by.
 
(5)
 
Mother, Mother
How you've sheltered me
In cavernous calling ---
A sea of sickening  
Dead air.
 
Wallow of redundancies
Gathered like sheaves of grain
The harvest is ripe and golden
I recieve it well
In being spared of hell.
 
Oh, heaves of pages
Heaping in literacy
To think that it died;
That I did
Plied in verses
Sentences weeping with
Your tears in rhyme.
 
The narrow umbillicus
Funnels the unnerving
Sustenant nutriment
Untoward a wayward
Detriment ---
 
A beacon of health ---
A one,
A heart.
 
              -----
 
 
 
Inspired by these poems:
 
            'Medusa'
            'Fever 103'
            'Lady Lazarus'
            'The Disquieting Muses'
 
                       - by Sylvia Plath