Earthspun

Home is held in a dark place, a dank place,
beneath the musted plates of glass where, once,
I curled and crept into the rusting lungs of some cabbagepatch god.
Here, words are trapped, tapped into the husks
of my fingernails, the mouldering beds of marrow.

In the silence, I have learned to turn and face the wall;
to let the earth knot and clot in the back of my throat.
My tongue is swollen to a bulb: a stopped geranium that’s fixed to falter,
enthralled by the depths at which I can slumber without
going under. In this silence, I have learned to burn

and breathe beneath my breadth. O the beauty of usage!
I will weight in this angle of repose till I am fully gorged.
And then, when I seed and sleep, my bones will grow and strike their maps
of rot and roots below, to a Mother who is all glut, all mouth.
I will be sown - a row of milk teeth and raw kidney stones –
into the gut of the undergrowth.

I am already half unstrung, and plumped for hunger.

Just a little longer –
till I am gone to the ground, till I am sleeping sound
amidst the cracked vowels of the earthspun song.

Just a little longer
till I truly belong.

* * *

Alternative title: Sowing Stones in Glass Houses

More mythology poems are coming soon, I promise! But first, this: my entry for Lit-Community's contest, of which the theme is 'belonging'.

There are several references here to Plath's poem Who, which is the first in the Poem for a Birthday sequence (on which this is also based).

.neptune

.

After the months spent in utero, walking feels strange.
Ground is sound in colour, synaesthesia beneath the heels,
watered down to reveal a horizon of endless blue, and Neptune.
Opening himself like a oracle. He is all mouth: a throat
of thunder, teeth a string of binary numbers. Kether of kelp,
barnacle bones strewn in every bottled message, each letter of
HELP scrawled into the shoreline. A missing-person clue.

Feet rubbed raw, he heads for the ocean, where those water-
logged wishers wash such surface wounds with their salted tears.
It's a pain that's only real when you're reeling, that you can only
find when hanging from fish-hooks and the coral-plugged ceilings
in the backwaters of your mind, though it's hidden behind
every dark glass. Basketcase, they may have said, but it's a fatal
tendency to identify the whole being with one interest,

and this will give him a certain distinction when he's dead;
an heir of tragedy. He looks out to sea, and sees white horses
ride the rip tide, dragging their kelpie cries and their jesus hair
through the air. They seem almost to catch and cloy, buoyed by
their bloated bodies. He would rather breathe water. But no –
he's over-exposed, caught under x-ray, so that only the bones show
through, blue-blooded. And by this, he knows, he's finally found his way
home.

.

* * *

Neptune was the god of water, the sea and (quite randomly, I feel) horses in Roman mythology.

The final stanza of this poem pays quite heavy tribute to Sylvia Plath's Medusa - one of my favourites.

The line 'a fatal tendency to identify the whole being with one interest' is a quote from critic A.C. Bradley describing the fatal flaw of Shakespearean tragic heroes. It's one I had to learn for my English Lit. exam which has stuck with me.

And if anyone's wondering what the hell this is all about, it's about the mother. It's always about the mother.

You can see the rest of my ever-growing mythology series here or here.

Nobody's Home

1. Spare Parts
She did it to feel real, or so she said:
cut out her caustic catatonia, and donated it to the collection
tin – spare change, or rather, change
spared, as she still keeps her splintered trophies
hugged close to the air, along with the trackmarks that cut
across the ceiling, and the rouged wrists that are just that: bruised
like fruit, with juice just as sweet. But she knows
that fate can’t be rearranged or exchanged –
a foetal-hearted metamorphosis is the inevitable
lullaby that dulls her days,
and though it's only first light,
the time is ripe
for the whitening of her bones.

As the sun unhusks itself
to an earth-spun hush, her silhouettes shatter – collapse
into the blackened bracken that’s struck its roots
through the floorboards
of nobody's home.


2. Birth Day
Her bones crackled for some time
before they were subdued to a satisfactory hue,
and she was tipped from the spilt-ink womb
to the lidless rooms of nobody's home,
where she found her whitened bones had grown
wild amongst the cabbage-roses of the carpet.
A garden weeded with spare parts.

So she sat among those thorns, pumpkin-crowned
and indolent, innocently waking,
waiting for answers
from the mute bulb-skulls
of the flowers.


3. The Waves
She had sat there for hours in vain
when the waves came; breaking against the windowpanes
with their foam-haired brows and rasping mouths.
At first, she was afraid - she shook,
and puked, and pared the moons right out
of her fingernails. It wore her thin,
desperate. Sleepdrunk,
she wormed her way through the wardrobe
and lodged her heart, disparate, between
a hard place and the stone face
of the wall.

It was months before she crawled
back to the surface. She learned
to brace herself for the impact
of the wracked waves' hollowed
bodies; their great blue tongues:
the elaborate act of composure.
Now she meets them with the
stone-lidded eyes of an angel.
Hallowed, statuesque,
she's abandoned all her prayers,
her layers of hope,
and holds only
a fistful
of dust.


4. Whitening
Sometimes, a child is born that is happiest alone. And when alone, they find that Nobody has locked her fingers into theirs, and dragged them to Nowhere, where Nobody keeps her hollow home. Here, Nobody takes their bones and buries them amongst the roots of her bracken-built throne, where they chatter and snap into maps of the heart –
impenetrable dark, where a tunnel opens upon a tunnel, upon a tunnel, upon a tunnel, upon a vein, upon a throat, upon a great blue tongue and the sound of the sea -
widening, whitening,
until there's nothing left but the whiteness
of a whitewashed heart of stone.


5. On Reflection
And she has no stories to tell,
but her clasped hands make a well
to cup the babel; a shape for shadows.
Her eyes are made of glass; her lashes, cut-grass -
they reflect, like mirrors, one whole.

{The mirror is a hole which she fills
until it becomes a glass half-
full.}

She's stuck in the deadlock of
a dumbshow with nobody –
and Nobody’s not giving anything away.


6. Barren
The silence is broken only by footfalls;
the soft calls from cut to cut,
inching the length of her arm like worms.
But there's no mine to be dug deep -
though rot aches from the maggot-jewels
of her eyepits, mouldering peach pits,
Nobody is barren.
Yoked too tight, she steps
carefully, cracking the fragile domes of ghost-shells,
cabbage-rose skulls -
each step and each snap
echoing like a harsh word angled
amongst the scars.

The girls who come here think they are birds.
She'll break their necks else
they fly.



7. The Door
Night time, and nobody's home –
she's left alone to roam the rafters
of the attic. Seeing the framework
of this ghost house is like peeking
behind the scenes, or peeling back
skin to see the skeleton within.
And by God, she's tried;
clawed at all those doors.

But in this time of silted moons,
something's shifted.
Everything is eerie in the dusk: even she
feels estranged, changed
by the low light of rumoured angels.
Little more than whispers, but they’re
the shadows that she’s shaped.
She'll unfurl their fevered wings and
fold them into form. Then,
they'll hold their candles high and melt
their waxen faces until their bones
burn to ash;

till she unravels the map and breaks
through the skylight of Nobody's home -

the knowledge of which is
weighted like stone.

* * *

I'm not going to lie – I quite like this one. I've been searching for the words to write something this personal in ages, and it's so good to finally get it out of the system. I feel like it's the most honest I've been able to be with myself in a while now.

The form is inspired by Plath's 'Poems for a Birthday' which is similarly written in seven parts, each section working as a stand-alone poem, but also as part of the larger piece.

Please go and read this in it's proper format on my dA page.

Which brings me on to some good news - my poem Of Star Guts and Satellites was recently awarded a DLD! This is the second time I've been featured by the group, and just goes to show how much my poetry has improved since my first real attempts back in the summer of 2008 (trust me, you don't want to see those!)

You're

You’re secret,
iridescent like tears;
an intricate spiders’ web
laced tight:
a smile, spliced.
Fair like the weather.

You’re my intravenous jigsaw,
with labyrinthine eyes
sewn shut.
My ball-jointed umbra,
strung sideways
and screaming.

You’re oscillating,
cinereal
you’re fractured glass -
a moon-skulled reflection;
bare and hollow,
black-backed like the undersides of stars.

You’re mute,
blurred at the edges -
a bird with feather flutings
and broken wings
falling
headfirst into sun-split daydreams.

You’re-
You’re –

not alone,
spit sister.

* * *

What is this - poetry!? Yes, this is my fail attempt at a poem...

Lots of recycled images in this one. I'm a little rusty, I'm afraid... This was inspired by Plath's poem (it's always the case!) of the same name, and was written for a writers' group workshop on second person poetry. I'm not sure if I will actually end up submitting this one or not, though: I'd like to see what you think.

Plath, Rihanna and Domestic Violence

Recently in English class, we have each been asked to lead a discussion on a poem of Syliva Plath's. I was given the poem 'The Jailor' - a poem in which Plath depicts a male/female relationship, with the man as a dominating 'jailor' figure, and the woman his abused prisoner. Despite his constant physical and emotional violence towards her, the persona of the poem realises they are dependent on one another, and that she cannot escape.

So, with this poem, I have based my discussion points around patriarchal domination/rebellion, the formulation of identity/mental instability, and ambivalence/victimisation.

Here, the most interesting theme for me is that of the persona's ambivalence: why, despite suffering so much, does she feel drawn to the abusive jailor figure? She has been 'drugged and raped', burnt with cigarettes, and reduced by forced starvation to a feeble, feverish state by this man - whom the reader assumes to be her partner. Plath spends the entire poem setting up the character of this persona as 'the victim': that is her identity. She is literally crushed, killed over and over by her relationship: 'hung, starved, burned, hooked.'

So why does she remain with the jailor, allowing herself to be his 'indeterminate criminal'?

There are two possible answers for this.

Firstly, she is a character entirely defined by her victimisation: part of which even she admits is, if not self-inflicted, self-cast - hence the movie-set like setting of the poem ('the same placard of blue fog is wheeled into position / with the same trees and headstones) and the fact that it is her 'red and blue zeppelin' that drops her 'from a terrible altitude'. She is defined solely by her relationship with the jailor. And in turn, he is defined by her. He can only be the jailor with a prisoner; thus he relies on her equally for his identity. 'What would he do, do, do without me.' is the final line of the poem, phrased not as a question, but as a statement, through which she directly reasserts her importance to him (and thus her power over him).

Secondly, there is the fact that, as far as the persona of 'The Jailor' is concerned, the codependence on which her relationship is founded equates with love.

So where does this link in with Rihanna? Well, when my Lit. group were discussing 'The Rabbit Catcher' (a poem with a very similar message to 'The Jailor'), several people were annoyed at Plath. They claimed she was self-obsessed, self-indulgent and pathetic: if her relationship was really as bad as she claimed, she should have just ended it. "She should just get over herself." someone said.

I think this point of view totally underestimates the ambivalence that people in a position such as the persona of 'The Jailor' are subjected to. They are genuinely torn.

And this is something that Rihanna discusses in her latest interview on her relationship with Chris Brown. She expresses the suffering of her ambivalence with painful honesty, which just goes to show the courage it has taken her to get out of that relationship and to now talk about it in front of millions.

So I think it is important to look at Plath's 'domestic' poetry in context: whether or not it is exactly based on her own relationship with Hughes is largely irrelevant. 'The Jailor' is a poem with a message about a woman who is in an abusive relationship. And the emotions she expresses are true to life, and are incredibly painful and difficult to overcome. It is not something that you can just 'get over'. As Rihanna said:

I am strong. This happened to me. I didn't cause this. I didn't do it. But it's happened to me, and it can happen to anybody.

Not everyone in the same position is as strong as Rihanna, who was able to face up to the situation and get herself out of it. The feeling of entrapment is not something we can underestimate. 1 in 4 women will be subjected to domestic abuse in their lifetime. This is a problem that we should be united to end, not something to ignore or underestimate.

No one is able to speak for all womankind, or for all abuse victims, or for all of any 'group' of people: everyone is individual. But every voice is relevant. And this is why we cannot ignore the words of someone like Plath, however self-obsessed and 'pathetic' she may appear, whether her poems are based on fact or are simply fiction. Her voice has a relevancy today, and her poems make a point that we shouldn't ignore.

Tulips

i.
The day after death, the flowers appeared.
A line of them; three crimson tulips standing proud and serene in the corner of my room, each surrounded by a little frayed halo of darkness where the carpet had been split. Fragile sapling tongues bejewelled with crowns dipped in blood.
Nobody watched me before: now I am watched. There is something conspiratorial about their existence, as if they have been sent to observe me, and whisper secrets behind my back. They stare like the blank eyed statues of angels you find in graveyards; immutable, wholly absorbed in their vigil. I don’t like to take my eyes off them for long in case they move.
The nurses don’t seem to notice my visitors: they bustle in, take my temperature, check my pulse, feel my forehead. To them I am a procedure, one of many that must be completed over the course of the day. No point in asking questions, prompting friendship – they know I woke up mute, and that my voice is just one of my missing parts. When the ritual is completed, they leave without so much as a glance at the tulips, their skirts rustling like autumn leaves.
The tulips are too much, their colour too sudden – they hurt my eyes. Against the white hospital walls they’re like blood drops on snow – sacrilege. I tried to hide, shoved my head beneath the sheets and pressed myself flat against the mattress, but it just reminded me how deflated I now was; how empty. Like a cut-paper doll, ridiculous, pressed between the eyes of the tulips and the eyes of the nurses.

And I have no face – I have wanted to efface myself.
But it is frightening, living as a shadow.


ii.
At night, they scream.
Every night they seal themselves, close up their buds, and wail wordlessly into the darkness. It frightens me, this inner crying. It’s as if the voices aren’t theirs but are coming from within, inside the petals, closed like fists.
Mother once told me that flowers are the reproductive organs of plants.

Oh God, what have I done?
I bury my head beneath the pillow, try to block my ears, but it’s no use. I’m screaming inside too.


iii.
Before they came, the air was calm. Breathing was a rhythm, in out, in-out, inout like the clockwork mechanics of a machine. No sentiment; no fuss. But the tulips filled it up with noise. Now my breath snags and catches in my throat, my tongue feels dry and swollen. I’m breaking down, I know it.
I stretch out, supine, on the bed, feeling my bones sink down into the mattress like roots into earth. I would like to stay here forever, a permanent part of the furniture, immovable and silent. I could haunt the ward; wrap myself in white sheets like a corpse. Scare the doctors to death. Here they’re so used to doling it out, like medicine; it would be nice to turn the tables for once.
Or I could just lie – lay, passive tense now, remember, now it’s all out of my hands - here and melt into the sheets. Let my blood seep into the floorboards.
Perhaps that’s why the tulips glint like rubies.


iv.
I keep my eyes fixed on them. I know they’re up to something; playing some game with my mind, working their twisted magic on me. Their whisperings have turned into sinister spells, a chanting that undulates like the beat of my heart. My second pulse – two again, I should be happy – but choking; my throat’s constricted and I’m retching, retching. Retching air because I’m already empty, oh God, so empty, nothing else left. From fruitful to barren. The blossoms died and withered inside me, and now they’re sprouting out my throat: I’m screaming flowers – crimson like blood.
I saw red, couldn’t take it any longer. Leapt out of bed and pitched a jug of water over their heads, watched it seep into the carpet, turning it black. I thought it would drown out their awful voices, strangle my awful new tongue.
Murder, cold and blue.
Like you, baby.
My baby.

The tulips rotted, shrivelled, their petal heads collapsing in on themselves, their screams caving in. I fell to the floor, pushed my knees to my forehead, clutching my sides, crying hollow words. Shrivelling too.

* * *

A short fiction prose-poem inspired by the poem of the same name by Sylvia Plath and Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' - both texts I'll be studying next year.