Unshuttered I’ll remain
I might be bruised because of the pain my body has endured
My broken bones are bound to heal
Yes the pain has pierced through my heart
Pain is part of life
A hole you have left in my heart
Somehow I believe an angel will mend the hole
And all will be whole again
Your lies have built mistrust in me
It’s only a temporary phase
Unshuttered I’ll remain
I refuse to let the bitterness you have built in me rule over my happiness
You have no idea how strong you’ve made me become
In a way you have sharpened me
I now see beyond my foresight
Beyond the limitations
You’re not the only one who will walk tall
I walk tall because I know I’m a fighter and survivor
I never lost the fight
I woke up and I rose, no matter how hard the blows kept coming
I know I’m dusty and not on form
But hey I’m still walking
U were once my hero, my reason to smile
I had trusted you with my heart
I thought u had held it dear close to yours
Until the day u let it fall to the ground
You threw it so hard that I thought it will never survive to see another day
It was a fun exercise for you and your friends
I watched as they laughed behind my back
I watched as u bragged and felt you had it all
I watched also as I rose to your disgust
I watched when you begged for my heart again
And I walked away without looking back
Backward I was not going
Forward was were my future was
The broken bones and bruises are bound to heal
Unshuttered I’ll remain
Moving and matching forward
Forward towards a better dream
Forward towards a better life
A life without you but a life full of me
Unshuttered
Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus
This image
Is just an image
Lines from a poem
That I have
Come to know
To love so well
In sickness
And in health
There is no greater
Love than the flight
From madness
Of sacrifice
A lament,
A hospital bed
And so I come
To her London experience
Her Ted Hughes
It was Sylvia I reckon
In the end
Who was Lady Lazarus
When you’re hallucinating
Reality is a snake park
There aren’t any ducks
I’m afraid
You can’t make
Lemonade out of lemons
There’s a show
And you’re the star
The spotlight
Is shining on you
You become Hiroshima
A kroeskop duchess
You become
A mountain lion
You become famous
Known for psychosis
And then overnight
You become a stranger
Nobody calls anymore.
David Foster Wallace
The cornfields
of Illinois are pretty
Where David Foster Wallace
grew up
His childhood
was made up of
bonfire anecdotes
Shark teeth
Infinite jest
He was the pale king
Sitting on an earth-throne
The so-called psychotic
Bewitched by libraries
by the halls of Amherst
The Midwest where of-all-things
Genocide took place
Murder and speeches
His dream songs
They came from space
He gripped his pen
Left behind
An alphabet
of vowels and consonants
Supernova writing
There were monsters
hiding in the closet
Monsters under the bed
The room is smaller
Than he remembers
When he returns home
From Amherst water
and lobsters pouring out
of him as he evaporates
America offers shelter for some
Worms, holes, the dark, maniacs
Hooks already programming him.
The hallucination of North American poet Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus
This image
Is just an image
Lines from a poem
That I have
Come to know,
To love so well
In sickness
And in health
There is no greater
Love than the flight
From madness,
Of sacrifice
A lament
A hospital bed.
And so I come
To her London experience
Her Ted Hughes
It was Sylvia I reckon
In the end
Who was Lady Lazarus
When you’re hallucinating
Reality is a snake park
There aren’t any ducks
I’m afraid
You can’t make
Lemonade out of lemons
There’s a show
And you’re the star
The spotlight
Is shining on you
You become Hiroshima
A kroeskop duchess
You become
A mountain lion
You become famous
Known for psychosis
You become
the doppelganger
of all ghosts
then overnight
In the snake park
You become a stranger
in your own hometown
Nobody calls anymore.
What I see
A little smirk a sharp edge of a cynic
A wanderer an observer a bona fide critic
A sigh- exhausted chuckles
Cleaning old blood from blistered knuckles…
What do you fight for what do you believe
When the truth is a bubble made of personal satisfactory
So hush my child don’t speak so loudly
They’re watching they’re judging
Hiding behind what keeps them safe
Blindly seeking truth within misplaced faith…
Breathing lessons
Anne Sexton
What are you made of
An elegant older sky
With a poet’s swagger in a nation of ghosts
The angel skin of winter
Therapist suggested
I write poetry and it feels sweet
I feel out of my depth
Simply blue and feeling melancholia
Is not enough to cancel out the midnight
I write to purge unhappiness
Chasing wild sheep and ambulances
An insomniac’s trick
I’ve discovered an empire
The empire of the introspective
I’m a superwoman and actress
Drama and always being
Brought to life by it
Provocative and enchanting
Exotic and intimidating
How to stay calm under pressure
A wolfish din far away in my head
Temper-temper-temper
Sometimes out of my comfort zone
Idyllic life yet miserable
Living in a glass house with glass ceilings
Daring to feel alive
Bone challenging clowns all around me
Bone challenging poetry
The reflection of a warmed-up fossil
Swarming in the ground
What do I see when I look
Is my face an enchanting face
Depression comes like a thief
(Lions and tigers and elephants too)
Daring to feel alive and authentic
Doesn’t like to be photographed
Am told I am beautiful and talented
Yet I am still unhappy and long for peace
Feeling a bit like Alice in Wonderland
Wearing the dress that goes anywhere
To meet up with good citizens
Every one is a tiger on the loose
Every thing is set on the loose.
Japan
And when at last it came
to the end of the book
the idea came.
Our imagination
is organic, and a wreck broken off.
And so we continue to imagine,
inspire, and interpret.
War is barbaric like the onset of dementia.
It is something we fail to understand.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Japanese girls are zoo-pretty.
Japan is majestic, an ancient-country.
All its interiors have secrets.
Yet the sky still speaks of blue,
finding the poem, the haiku.
Welcome to Sarajevo, snipers, mass graves.
When seen from afar
Forget this war, forget all places of weeping.
Japan, Sarajevo and Africa.
Earth is simply waiting
for me to describe it.
Instead I speak about Japan and Sarajevo.
Poets who live not in this world of human nature
But rather a cage of their own making and design.
They walk on dirt roads African poets.
With their shamanic wisdom and their sails.
Their words are as old as a telescope, fossils, totem poles,
tribes, trees, Darwinism, the touch of the hands
of my paternal grandmother, antiques,
the coelacanth, the dishes that are waiting
for me in the sink, the footprint of childhood
On the beach sucking a waterfall of sea.
What happened at Lonmin
Comrades you have a gifted self:
A voice to articulate the profound
Inequalities that you find yourself in
The knowledge of unrest and frustration
This is your journey
But now it has become part of all of us
You are all my rich blood
My Mother’s milk
A postcard to a comrade abroad:
Have you ever wondered what a picture
Of home means like to you
It’s lovely to dream and to think
That the world is so full
Of wonder and possibilities
Rilke, Neruda and Rupert Brooke
Rimbaud and Verlaine
All the classics
Have nothing and everything to do with it
With the Marakana inquiry
And the blue pearl that is this planet
Comrades I can see the kingdom
Of your hearts and your survival
The net and the countenance of stigma
I can see it already
The romancing of the revolution
Its tour of the world is as ancient as the stars
Torn from afar between the moon
And planets and the millions of other stars
So I am writing to thank all of you
For your spiritedness mothers and fathers
For the dream machines of all sisters and brothers
Facing the landscape of decay and poverty
To the children of the revolution
I know we have all felt the need
Admired the art that lies in the comfort
Of strangers and the world they inhabit
But God holds the world and heaven
In His thumbprint of the universe
The ash and dust of an angel’s handiwork
Not to ponder that is to be a non-believer.
Grief
Sons and daughters they’ve raised.
Cloth of love they’ve shared for years.
Cancer attacked the foundation – took them off
to hell for a decade and a half (called off remission).
Cancer reached the wuthering heights of America.
It became a country at war with itself.
Child soldiers marching through – matchstick men every one
thinking that they were the nation’s best.
That made me feel so small and inadequate
We weren’t intimate friends but did that matter
In the end nothing did because with time
You forget and there is a kind of peace that comes with that.
The Beekeeper’s Daughter’s Suicide
The glory of wisdom and ego shrunk to accommodate the villagers
Wounding spirits.
She the significant one. She is my angelic conjured up myth
She who always tells me in her poetry to rise, rise again above volcano dreamers.
Liquid deep are the secrets of my heart. The stem of intimacy grows silently.
Give me enough rope and surely I will hang myself.
The handmaiden’s pulse is there. The muscle is there like unfinished things from childhood.
It pushes at the difficult thoughts I have.
They have a hard appearance from the outside like a seduction theory,
The blue steel of the sky, the land that borders on God, perplexity, sanctuary.
Like poverty and death, the angelic dream of it. I am as serious as an ill tiger,
I laugh like a hyena in the face of the man on the moon. I am a coping lioness.
My mother did not keep me from children who were rough.
She wanted me to experience the world (that humanity is a violent species).
My mother left me there hanging on for dear life. As a child the details of my life
Soon became embroidered by tortuous emptiness, the innoncence of autumn cast out.
Bold smile through her great depression. Wife interrupted. Mother of Frieda and Nicholas Hughes. There was always a journey of moving forward worshipping the past.
Where is the sun in an argument? Where is the physical body in flight in dream-mode?
She saw the skylines of New York, had a London experience, married an Englishman, a poet.
Solitude and loneliness, being an introvert should have been included in the commandments.
Her bright faith and loyalty, the love she had for her children was like music from the heart.
Her bright faith was as bright as the lights in Los Angeles. Her loyalty was a prize.
The glory of her bravery was unbalanced, and her rage was that most rare thing.
Sylvia Plath, daughter and poet, wife and mother, gone too soon to heaven.
Melancholia and of the sky in her eyes and the other half of her gone to hell on earth.
Bird, leaf, madness, jealousy all symbols of life, of humanity and so we come to adulthood.
Now her poetry educates young people’s minds now that she is no longer flesh, bone.
I think a present-day Sylvia would be reluctant to be called beautiful,
Lonely, misguided, depressive, and intelligent. A Sylvia who lived a madness life,
Who fell ill at the end of her life, is a Sylvia whose heroism lives on
In her poetry, her soul’s progress, the people who relate to it destination anywhere.
