Plath Confessional
by Lee Krauss
Every morning, over several
cups of oat milk, coffee-poured,
the consternation in my brows accompanied with
spiraling rounds of maladaptive daydreaming;
god gazes out of my closet as I make
to-do lists on my phone, it goes:
I am 13 and I want to shed skin—
coil around the emptiness of my stomach like a saw-scaled viper;
Make it consume itself; I am
a poet and I want Plath’s soul to haunt my skull,
to drum against my temple in plangent tones
like its seething on dull embers in the oven.
In my mum’s kitchen, she asked me to skip rope,
(I didn’t care much for that).
I also want a green skirt,
lace, fabric, free-flowing—
Most of all, I want to be free of all this space I occupy.
Somedays, I want a cloud of my own, I want to view
the world in a slow-moving panorama,
to see,
(to see),
for once be rid of this three-dimensional
blindness, that only convolutes into that;
At 16, I want a friend (I am tired);
I am the sole presence at all my grandiose soliloquies;
This man grooms me so
At 19, I think I want a boy, I know I want dreamy eyelids and
I also want to be smarter than the voices that wrote of fevers
and tulips before sticking
head into oven. We spoke of
Machiavellian ethics and such, I drew sunflowers on face
(and such).
At 21, there were no more boys, only relief
(half-hearted, choked)---
At 22, I want to marinate in the salt
water comfort of knowing it is my own eyelids that grieve
me, and not some backhanded breaking of dreams and such.
At 22 I wish I was permeable stone.
God sits, sits and listens as I make
to-do lists on my phone, every minute accounted for
(for I cannot drown), (I cannot suffocate),
god sits, sits and sings in synch with the tap (tap) tap of
my decided footsteps of the godforsaken vernacular, he is
listening and disposing, (opposing),
listening and disposing, (decomposing);
The stubborn villain, stealthily,
Satan after all was a fallen angel. He guards,
snake-like, and listens, rattling.
God knows, he is
scribbling all over me.