Toasting Bread
It’s intelligent to have only one child, isn’t it.
My husband said, let’s just have one and be done.
I insisted, no...he has to have a brother or sister.
Such a mistake to add to the fire.
You can’t give them near enough with two,
when they are born so close together.
Listen to you.
Regret seems to be your only commodity.
Young mother, look here: regret is something you must earn.
Earn it, like me - or don’t - this spent body,
this dead mind.
Do you think I spend the seconds wondering
what might have been if I hadn’t gone through with it?
Gone through with what?
Oh please, just say it, quit the tiptoe.
The oven.
why dance around it
oven oven oven oven
Bliss was never to be mine.
I was too...messy in the mind.
That’s your issue, as well, isn't it?
You think that your mind isn’t normal…that it isn’t well
Darling, let me give you some advice:
Oh yes, please, Sylvia, show me how to write;
No. I show you how to end your life.
In doing so, you will become - a someone - a something,
she who writes the devil's miracles.
The trick is, honey,
to make them believe you didn’t die
to obtain iconic status.
The Teapot Should Be Whistling Soon
Adroitly, eh,
You think you’ve got something on me?
I am the queen of adroitness,
of lunacy, un spiked switch and paddle.
I reverse La Pietà;
Jesus holds his Virgin Mother,
ubiquitous cross and thorns;
I adorn nothing; absorb His scorn
God will mount me; pink hued,
for naked lunch below the Yew.
I nibble, unaskew of this messy to-do
Note this, unstable prodigy:
your poems or your children,
one cannot bask in glory of both.
So I declare that I shall have the neither & the nor;
don’t you remember Sexton and Woolf?
If I shan't have a room of my own,
then I will become the room
and the walls all around.
They will feel my sour breath,
slit mouth harangues it’s metallic chant,
my rows of carp teeth pierce their manly necks.
I clamp down,
deliver a stake to their rescindent breasts.
1,2,3 poof!
I deliver my airs. I’m a bomb
Ph.D, gale force
dioxin, lethally toxic,
I dare them to breathe me in.
Vapor. Gas.
Vice. Women.
Children. Crying.
Nights. Poems.
Ocean. Death.
Marriage. Rows.
Endings. Chambers.
Rot & Cached.
I’m gone.
To Be Polite, I Sip the Over-steeped Tea
I only meant that
I am really good at
feeling sorry for myself.
Not that I had a corner on the market.
You have the corner,
I promise; I recant.
I have not such brass tits as thee,
O mighty slayer
of men. A gallant tertiary,
Otto, Ted, Nicholas.
That’s three...not counting
any daughter or mother or you
Feminism does not
hold that we mourn our wombs
nor our gelatinous skin.
Yet Cixous says we are different, from that.
If I was in England all alone in a flat,
towing the line
fed up pushing the pram,
wiping green shit, blue puke
red wounds, brown germs
if I was a young mum,
isolated, armed and riddled
with your brain
perhaps,
just perhaps,
I would have done the same.