island-state

Imitations of Drowning

Fear

of drowning,

fear of being that alone,

kept me busy making a deal

as if I could buy

my way out of it

and it worked for two years

and all of July.

This August I began to dream of drowning. The dying

went on and on in water as white and clear

as the gin I drink each day at half-past five.

Going down for the last time, the last breath lying,

I grapple with eels like ropes - it's ether, it's queer

and then, at last, it's done. Now the scavengers arrive,

the hard crawlers who come to clean up the ocean floor.

The Examined Life 

“Reallocation of Power vs Reorganising People...”

“I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:  

It is what you fear.

I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,  

Its dissatisfactions?

Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.

How you lie and cry after it

Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,

Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,  

Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?  

This is rain now, this big hush.

And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.  

Scorched to the root

My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.  

A wind of such violence

Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me  

Cruelly, being barren.

Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go

Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.  

How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.  

Nightly it flaps out

Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing  

That sleeps in me;

All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.

Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?  

Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.  

What is this, this face

So murderous in its strangle of branches?——

Its snaky acids hiss.

It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults  

That kill, that kill, that kill.”

Words : ELM - Sylvia Plath 

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.