memoirs of a poet

“Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.” ― Sylvia Plath

Lit, are barren candles, 
The only source of illumination.
Hapless, my space is, with its peeling edges and tender decay.
I become a wraith to myself here. 

Even the insects in my sheets, 
A pale ladybug slipping in raindrops,
The mournful flower petals on my windowsill, praying a dirge for the vase,
Have created their manacled fate. 
Cynicism circles around them,
Nihilism, like the firm pith of a vivacious orange, must be picked off. 

Nietzsche said ‘God is dead,’ and did not live to tell the tale. 
So why, when God is eternal, should I play dead.
Since this epiphany, I have become saint-like,
For myself.
I have not quite Ran away from the ghosts;
Instead, 
They hold onto my pinkie fingers, 
Touch the sky from my shoulders.

Plath taught me that I am my own prison.
Upon learning this, 
Dawn has become a sacred time for me. 
Daylight traces the outline of my curtains,
A golden lining embraces the slipping darkness.
The seraphic, yet mortal tasks of my day dance.
Kissing the edges of the undisturbed instances of praise for my Lord. 
Quicken the heart, deepen the breath, for I am living for myself. 
What I once loved has returned to me anew,
Learning is no longer a burden, rather a fervent passion,
Writing is no longer a chore but a need, a must, 
A              string             of Fate, 
Tying me to my youthful fairy tales of talking frogs and lonely caterpillars.
Metamorphosis was pending.

Virgil reminded us to ‘live,’ for soon twitching, is death.
Morning comes once more,
A cup of tea, my friend.
A wishless dandelion on a blunt knife,
Stretching itself across a slice of warm toast.
Pure simplicity made ambrosial. 
Like sickly sweet cupcakes my friends hand out girlish laughter, 
The kind that rectifies the heart, the kind that catches.
My cat tells me he loves me,
He thinks I am his owner, alas, he is mine. 

The sonorous cry of the speaker as he pleads for absolution,
The soles of our feet, raw with begging.
Mercy is what we want,
In abundance.
Catharsis at last.
But I hear it in the swish of the tea,
The scratch of the knife on the toast,
The incoherent babbling of a sister,
The screech of my cat, come dawn.

What if Sisyphus’s boulder was an incandescent marble,
Sampling sunlight each time it reached the peak. 
What if each day the boulder’s rough fringes became smoother,
The desolate hill, no longer obsolete.
Allowing us to run and
Run and run and run and run,

                                                                    ignorant to the absurdity, the monotony.