Last night, as I sifted through some of my earlier poetry, I remembered just how therapeutic writing it was at the time. I was so young, unprepared for the realities of husband and child/children. And I married someone as unprepared as I. He dealt with it all through multi-media productions of his original scripts. I would sit in the audience and watch the characters he created speak to our relationship more poignantly than his face-to-face words ever did.
I’m not sure I ever showed him the poems I wrote as I slowly felt my own self lost in the wake of his magnificent obsession. I’m sure there were many young women like me. Some went mad. Some got mad.
I am no Sylvia Plath. These are not great poems. But they were, and are, an essential part of my story.
I await the unexpected,
the unsought.
My life is a contradiction.
When the goal is set,
when conscious action
strips away the dream,
I turn off.
Because I am
(why?)
a patterned person,
I am surrounded, bound, bonded.
I don’t need any more directions to go
or any more goals to touch.
I wish I were the wind.
Change is what I
wear at the edge
(where I have the best perspective)
waiting for familiar whims
to coax me into shape
and coast me down
the deepening dayslide.
Essentially, I am
not.
Medusa, I
am stoned on my own reflection.
Words curl straight
from the hurt in my head
forming questions,
marked and mumbled
under a heavy heartless hum.
Pan (Peter), I
cling to the rings
of endless adolescence,
hanging tight
as the merry goes round
Zelda, I
run screaming
toward the dark and gathered things
that claw at the threshold
of darkest dreams
and dive naked and dancing
into the fountained pool
behind my eyes.
“stoned on my own reflection.”
I like that line and I’ve know people about whom you could say that.