Smothered

The mind is a stuffed animal:
crammed with sardines,
nailed onto thoughts,
jammed into silence.
Hanging from the wall,
it stares bulgy-eyed
yawns and creeps
into an unfriendly body.
It now lives inside a face
in the shade of a tongue,
and breeds.

Wake Up

Will you wake up with tears
of a dead poem? Frozen words
seeking warmth in deceptive fears

caught in forgotten lines, it appears,
memory fleeting like a sunbird.
Will you wake up with tears

falling from eyes of wild deer
roaming forests – unknown, unfurled?
Close, yet far from deceptive fears

breathing a wind that smears
red over weary paths of a shepherd.
Wake up with tears

of a dead poem where lived seers
spirits of reasons absurd,
in a mind, still for years.

Come, touch these tears
alive to songs churned
by sleeping eyes. You should wake up with tears
of a dead poem to live, far from fears.

On Seeing Sylvia Plath’s Sketches

Sylvia, did your rooftops surface from
houses where poetry slept bored?

Your sweet things and insipid nothings,
your ubiquitous umbrella and the Beaujolais

your Paris, your Wisconsin, your Hawley
the absurd cow, the curious cat

Did they all crawl into dawn
from the dusk of your words?

Did they float
with the lightness of your spirit

Or drown
with you in interpretation?

Sylvia, take them back, back
to your scary metaphors
and fierce similes.

Your lines stay alive
in the night of your poems
not in the day of your sketches.

Acknowledgement: ‘Ubiquitous umbrella’ is part of the collection of Sylvia Plath’s drawings exhibited currently at London’s Mayor Gallery.