Nothing in Moderation
a found poem: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Path
Writing is a ruinous sickness. It is hysteria
and exhausted nerves—
a continuous destructive abrading danger.
But who am I
to behave as if writing is not everything
I want? This brooding
on razor-shaved thoughts makes me
myself. This fall into the tempting whirlpool
of unborn idea is what I enjoy.
I wake, I read, I write my own inner life
in simple observant lines. There is no cure
for this fanaticism.
What can I do but write?
I have made myself into a wakeful ghost
with no sense of balance
and now I am daydreaming of becoming
a wild frenzy of a poem.
Writing Is a Malady
a found poem: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
How I struggle with sleep: I think day and night
of only writing
but I haven’t the discipline to really live
for poetry, for dreams
of a world growing wiser.
I feel exhausted and drugged—
queerly sick of all
the days naked of purple joy.
My work is too gaudy and embittered.
I am a miserable-visaged nightmare
a furtive being
and nothing I feel—nothing I write—matters.
My life—this queer prison
of fatigue and weariness—is broken
and there is no remedy.
How will I ever come close to feeling rested?
Endless Pages
a found poem: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Words are heavy and ungainly but I feel
fluent in creation. Poems—
untried angels—hide
in my disturbed mind and make life
something near unbroken.
This is my life-work:
making and making to forget that one day
I will have to face the horror
that is the future.
Hell—all dead birds, ugly
angered children, and strange
hair-raising skies—
is not here yet
and writing can be prophesying:
one sentence, one description
perpetually spinning its determined web.
Baptized
a found poem: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I was bathing in the shining blue sea
caressed and purified by smooth undulations
my soft body deliciously comfortable
under the glowing sun
but then God—timeless, colossal, glinting—
arose on his querulous altar
and seeped into me
like bonewhite consuming fire.
My being filled with a hard impersonal heat.
I ached—all my great love and desire
burning like brittle seaweed.
My every fiber was dried sharp and perverse.
I felt like every other human—carved
flesh cleansed of peace.
***
Author photograph courtesy of Nazifa Islam
