Electrafied

For Christmas, one year in college, I received the Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Inevitably, I spent a few months infatuated with Plath’s maudlin hyperlyricism. Few writers can make self absorption as compelling; Kerouac maybe, JT LeRoy (were he not fictional). There’s something hypnotic about Plath’s verse, drawn from a well of caustic freudian melodrama, expertly decanted through surrealist imagery. Anyway, this is just a little love poem to Sylvia, written by a smitten boy in his twenties, falling for her verse. Recently published in the latest issue of Saul Bowman’s ever more nominally diverse zine ‘This is Not Where I Belong’.

Electrafied

Sylvia,
My guess, your dress, of words
has been deflowered
As leonine, base,
As of a caul of death
That icy slick, your scald, has shed
and glitter split
a wax chrysalis

Sylvia,
What is a boy to do,
to impress you
to vain a chalk scratch
in the hoof print of your metre
Quirk a smile, from that
flatland greyscale snap of you
American, at twenty two
and possessed

Sylvia,
let us abide
in the bower of crafted elm
like wickedness
Crowd to the quick and conch
the tug of undertow
your terracotta emblem,
pity deep the mournful flow
trawling last words

Sylvia,
the ruddy microns of the air
are hefting Hughes and you
in this splendid friction of April
crackling diaphanous specters
rising ever to the heat
vague as notes
red as balloons
unbound Ariels