Random Poetry

This was written in response to an article on the erection of a statue to Sylvia Plath. I thought she would hate the notion.


Madly

Did you know they’d make a statue of you?
All Grecian and earnest and true,
I’ve looked and looked, and wonder if you
find it as ghastly as I do.
Poets can never be bronzed

they’d crack and splinter and spew.
You marched on daddy in jackboot,
now, I might like to too

but I’ll always be compared to you.
No matter how new or true—
so I’ll burn an effigy or two

and say, “Adieu, my fair
little Jew.”

But I’ll never be rid of you.

a nonEuclidean cell
I am here by verdict of birth
imprisoned around the New Year
of ‘82.

My jailor, Id, wears taffeta
and likes to lay around all day and listen to Jazz,
and make bold claims like, “Coltrane tastes
like cherries.”

Sometimes I find my muse like a geologist,
and I have to hammer away
until she speaks to me and bleeds
an epiphany on the concrete

As I am bound, you are bound,
but I mean to escape—to hang
myself from nothing on a tether of dreams
and forgive myself the geometry of thinking