Poetry: Apocrypha
“Envy tastes like copper filings.
It settles into the stomach wall and plies
its sinuous trade, hawking green-eyed girls
at the tented market of the womb — thin-mattresses
waifs with syringe-scored ribs.
Under fallopian awnings
they turn their chlorinated eyes inward,
lashes slice into the flesh as they blink slowly,
once, twice.Envy sidles into the blood, jangling metals and plastics,
is yearn-swollen fingers all ringed in agates and amethyst–
so fat that knuckles bulge tumescent out of the gold bands.Eel-headed, it stretches and pants, breath filled
with rotted diamonds.
It claws and adores and kisses the edge
without guessing the center, cobbling a
hermetic path, yellow and grey,
down into the rickety basement door
of the second heart–
the secret heart, shut as a reliquary
that whispers sulfuric villanelles into the dark
while storm shutters screen against glass
threatening expulsion from the apple-bled
rooms of the interior.This other heart is a city of wan-faced slattern-beasts,
snouts pressed against frozen windows, bones
howling for hot bread. But it is beautiful there, in the black
aorta, blood pure as grain alcohol.
In these jealous walls the self instructs the self–
the second heart murmurs
its beatific perversions
to the first.”from Apocrypha by Catherynne M. Valente
Tags: apocrypha, catherynne m valente, poetry
Poetry: “Instructions” by Neil Gaiman
Touch the wooden gate in the wall you never saw before,
Say ‘please’ before you open the latch,
go through,
walk down the path.
A red metal imp hangs from the green-painted front door,
as a knocker,
do not touch it; it will bite your fingers.
Walk through the house. Take nothing. Eat nothing.
However,
if any creature tells you that it hungers,
feed it.
If it tells you that it is dirty,
clean it.
If it cries to you that it hurts,
if you can,
ease its pain.From the back garden you will be able to see the wild wood.
The deep well you walk past leads down to Winter’s realm;
There is another land at the bottom of it.
If you turn around here,
you can walk back, safely;
you will lose no face. I will think no less of you.Once through the garden you will be in the wood.
The trees are old. Eyes peer from the undergrowth.
Beneath a twisted oak sits an old woman. She may ask for something;
give it to her. She
will point the way to the castle. Inside it
are three princesses.
Do not trust the youngest. Walk on.
In the clearing beyond the castle the twelve months sit about a fire,
warming their feet, exchanging tales.
They may do favours for you, if you are polite.
You may pick strawberries in December’s frost.Trust the wolves, but do not tell them where you are going.
See more after the cutTags: animals, children's poems, diamonds and toads, fantasy, illustrations, keith eric williams, little red riding hood, modern fairy tales, neil gaiman, poetry, wolf
Poetry Corner: Angel of Flight
Angel of flight and sleigh bells, do you know paralysis,
that ether house where your arms and legs are cement?
You are as still as a yardstick. You have a doll’s kiss.
The brain whirls in a fit. The brain is not evident.
I have gone to that same place without a germ or a stroke.
A little solo act—the lady with the brain that broke.In this fashion I have become a tree.
I have become a vase you can pick up or drop at will,
inanimate at last. What unusual luck! My body
passively resisting. Part of the leftovers. Part of the kill.
Angel of flight, you soarer, you flapper, you floater,
you gull that grows out of my back in the dreams I prefer,stay near. But give me the totem. Give me the shut eye
where I stand in stone shoes as the world’s bicycle goes by.
- Anne SextonTags: angel, anne sexton, poetry, stream of consciousness
Poetry: Her Sweet Anatomy
“Number 8″ from Pictures of the Gone World
by Lawrence FerlinghettiIt was a face which darkness could kill
in an instant
a face as easily hurt
by laughter or light‘We think differently at night’
she told me once
lying back languidlyAnd she would quote Cocteau
‘I feel there is an angel in me’ she’d say
‘whom I am constantly shocking’Then she would smile and look away
light a cigarette for me
sigh and riseand stretch
her sweet anatomylet fall a stocking
Tags: poetry
Poetry Corner: “Lady Lazarus”
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it–A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right footA paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?–The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on meAnd I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to seeThem unwrap me hand and foot–
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladiesThese are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shutAs a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.- from “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath
Tags: poetry, resurrection, sylvia plath
Poetry: “Tulips” by Sylvia Plath
This is one of my favorite poems ever.
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.Tags: emptiness, hospitals, poetry, self-awareness, sylvia plath
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