Tales Of A Tub

This is it:
the storybooks,
the soft carpets, and now,
at the end of the corridor,
the bath is running.

The water is tongueless, breathless.
I make a well in the thunder,
and shape a space for myself
to rock shut in the crux of a chemical
imbalance, this dyskrasia. It tastes
of finality: the salt of stones
and shattered wrists. Restless slumber.


But
it is also this:
my fists clenched on the future,
a destiny of my own design,
my own undoing. There is no aura,
no mystique – just a raw kind of power.
An open weakness. No more
tapping tables, knocking on would-
have-beens. I'll just lay back,
get waterlogged;

get ready to dream.

* * *

Dig, Ophelia. Just keep on digging.

This - this was painful. It's based on something that happened a while ago now, but I've never quite managed to tell anyone. I'm going through dark spaces at the moment, and I keep reliving this, over and over. Thought maybe it's time I let it breathe.

Again, sorry if this makes anyone feel uncomfortable.


Title's taken from Tale of a Tub by Plath, which this is in no way based on - it was just something I stumbled across again whilst wracking my brains for a title.

The New Zero

You say
there is no sense
in long nights spent
spinning myself out of glass,
the web of imperfections that
choke out my reflection. But I'll
do it anyway: trace the scars that map
the arms, the rough husk round zerospace.
Taking each new glitch, each old, unspent
love and shaping it into formulae, answers.
And if you could only understand one
thing about me, I wish it were this:
that there are two sides to every story,
and while there's one in composition,
the other's weighting,
in position.

* * *

'God, how self indulgent, I thought, but whom should I indulge if not myself? ... [They are] battle scars. "I have a heart to break" is all it means. "I am killable". ... It was never supposed to be a way of life: it was about survival.' – Emilie Autumn, The Asylum

Sorry if this makes you feel uncomfortable – god, I know full well how it can make people feel. But it's something I felt had to be said.

Title is from this song of the same name by Rasputina. I feel it fits.


Please go and see properly formatted version of this here on my deviantart page.

Fever Pitch

This is the only way I know myself:
from here to here; the clutch of gut
between an armspan. And you –
you are the whorl of pyrexia
in my chest, a knot of words
I can't quite express
except in a kind of half-rhyme,
in a rhythm that falters like a pulse.

And I know my boundaries;
that there to there's just air – a gulf
before the sure borders of your shore.
A full fathomlessness, bream-deep;
seasick retrogrades, and a thousand reams
of water to tread.

But I feel just fine,
I could run forever -

For you,
I would scale the depths
of this fever pitch,
and bring you back
what's stitched to the linings
of my ribs: too deep breaths
and a casketful of sleep.

* * *

For you.

I woke up today and realised that I am not a robot, after all.
[I am in fact, a nuke bomb, but that's another story...]


♥ Fever Pitch – The Romanovs
♥ Incident in a Medical Clinic – Rasputina
Perhaps two of my favourite love songs ever. Not that either of them is actually about love. :P

Rhetorica

It is for the best (they said).
They meant the fall. But
there is only light when the sky is rent
and I have sold my soul for another attempt
at this -

the chimeric fantasies, psychosis
in the palm of a hand. It has a certain charm
about it that few would understand,
like a clam that's swallowed a pearl
and lets the ancient words uncurl
across its tongue.

My own poetic prophecies didn't turn out so well.
I drunk a whole epitaph; my own epoch
that I picked from the pockets of time.
It was a binary kind of silence, acted out
to the knitting of heels to train tracks,
the breaking open of mouths, sealed.
They said the sighs would interrupt the songs
but I never had a melody to begin with,
I never had a voice. No choice but to let
the ceiling slip; to learn to inhabit an emptiness
once more.


Sometimes I check the empty spaces
between the collarbones to make sure
I'm truly alone. Paranoia's my symbiotic,
my rhetoric, and all I know
is that when I go out
I'm never
coming
home.

* * *

There are two sides to every story. This is one of them.
It's the most wonderful and terrifying feeling. Last time, I couldn't stop laughing for hours on end until it caught up with me. Hitting earth again really hurts.

Let's play spot the reference! There are several literary/lyrical references here (from 2 songs and 2 books). Anyone who manages to guess one gets a virtual cookie. <3

I Capture

Let's talk about something else.
I have decided that I am not going to grow
into anything other than who you think I am,
and that in this, I will finally be life-size;
happy. Through you, I will save myself –
memories of a scrap of civilisation, bone
china and tectonic plates - a relic
for the children of friction, clutching
at my wrist bones, my knee caps,
their scattered gravity.

Once, someone said We are all born undone,
and that we would find ourselves in nots –
the hips, the ankles, the knots of rib and spine.
The spacetime in between. I capture
the tarsal, frozen in a footprint;
you, a series of scars.

This is what I want to believe in:
the architecture of a fiction,
of a woman with a Mona Lisa smile.
I am not what I am, but what you see:
a whorl of semiotics; an artist's impression
of me.

* * *

Enough talk about me. Let's talk about you.
What do you think of me?
(L7, 'I Need')


I'm pretty sure this is one of the reasons I write confessional poetry - to get someone else to answer the questions I can't.

Quote is from Moll Flanders. Which I still haven't finished. First lecture is tomorrow! :\

Sleeptalk

I buried the dead
and they came up stories.
- Angle of Repose, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum

I am made of a series of stumbles;
of mispronunciations and a rhyming guide
to natural histories. Nights spent revisiting
the mysteries of the frame of a lightbulb,
fish nets, home. Such screams and sleeptalk
as dreams are made on and I am torn from –
as I am forcefed a pulse and a rhythm
and a mantra to forget them all by day.

I am the tempest:
the tongue of a soothsayer,
a palm full of future; and I'll keep
sleepwalking, snowfaced,
until I have nothing left to say.

* * *

And I'm running out of words.


Hopefully I'll get the chance to touch this up later - I'm not happy with it as it stands. Just needed to write something uber-personal again because I feel like I haven't been myself in a while, and it's starting to scare the crap out of me. :\

Now back to my reading list! [/procrastination]


Angle of Repose is an insanely amazing song, I love it so.
Also, Shakespeare references ftw!