For Sylvia Plath
I wish you had taken a final impossibly tall glass of whiskey. Though I believe you preferred wine a slower phantom escape. For the deeply troubled before taking a final walk through an abyss of cut glass. I wish after that drink you'd looked at the papers that would become Ariel. Piled in a neat stack while your children slept and you put head in oven. Having written a classic brutal and devastating candle to a reckoning between life and death by one not fully in either drained of blood and hope. Yet last week, within days I saw both a comedian and a movie use you as punch lines to cheap jokes mocking the somber savage music of your work. That took all you had making me so angry I wanted violence. But I poured a tall glass let the whiskey transport me to a calm cool place. As I wish that you had that morning and smiled with a new thirst for life. Transient Bliss We kiss to advance the plot while surprises remain. And the red neon makes everything look like glass. Where I can see I'm far more fragile. Self defense escapes me when her lips beg pierce me and yes ask for more. Ah transient bliss. Until the next day both having had this fragment we call enough... The edge of a star which eviscerates us to let go... Hanging on to memory behind a door closed forever. Every Fix She's always almost/not quite on the corner or between as she slides in and out of cars that barely register like revolving Johns, Joes, Jims who pay the fare. Nameless as any butterfly in stolen doomed flights to bed sheets absent of warmth life/promise in well titled no look no chance motels. Until fate strangles the chase with death, O.D. or prison. The lean obituaries are grim for girls of streets they do not own. I've watch her as any sinister doubt endemic in an overdose laid bare then lost. Lost forever as she leaves to fall in deeper chasms of ruin as days fall to the warmth and delusion inside every fix Distance of The Bees She says the bees ruin her flowers I say nothing and drink the air the sun gives no life to in the shade. We dance around every empty space allowed us by former lovers accounting for denuded dreams we circle each other with. Much like the the bees content with the succulence of a flower unable to resist She's an actress when she can find work worth her time. A large inheritance takes care of the rest which she hints includes me. At 34 she says she is too old for all of this, then says nothing more. Enters the house and slams the door after I mention the arbitrary vortex of spending time apart. While the bees circle from a distance I've come to understand. BIO : Rp Verlaine lives in New York City. He has an MFA in creative writing from City College. He taught in New York Public schools for many years. His first volume of poetry- Damaged by Dames & Drinking was published in 2017 and another – Femme Fatales Movie Starlets & Rockers in 2018. A set of three e-books titled Lies From The Autobiography vol 1-3 were published from 2018 to 2020. His newest book, Imagined Indecencies, was published in February of 2022.
Fevers of the Mind 