I carried these sallow infants around
These unfinished poems
Swaddled in heavy blankets
To hide their deformity
Pale lips wet with frothing spleen
They shrieked, the same nonsensical lines
Dug their little talons into my heart
Hurting for a mother’s love
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Atrophied in my reticent embrace
They suckled feverishly
At the wilting bosom of my waning muse
The once succulent
Drops of inspiration
Ashes mixed sparingly
With a few droplets of fat
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Their bodies thickened grotesquely
With each attempted feeding
They developed at a disproportionate rate
As if inflicted with Elephantiasis
More hideous than before, I had no choice
I hacked away at their tumorous masses
Destroyed in the process their fragile structures
Ligaments in shreds, tendons in tatters, bones pulverized
Unable to support their own weight
They wasted away to nothing more
Than a haunting impression
A simpering bag of flesh
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Occasionally I attempted to pass off
These wretched infantile words
As fully-developed prose
Timidly I unbound them
Dressed them up with a clever title
Perhaps I am a vain heartless mother
Perhaps I have failed to recognize
This rare beauty, maybe these words
Are not deformed at all
Maybe they’ve evolved beyond the need for legs
Or a heart or soft pink fingers
That pluck gingerly the rib-bound
Mandolin strings of a human heart
Perhaps they are fine as they are
Their glutinous tongues
Hanging from anemic mouths
Curdled breath, struggled
Lepidote skin, chalky white
Nose a single slivered opening
Like a coin slot
It’s obvious they are special
Simmering in their vinegary air
Tiny pickled basilisks
Why I bet people would pay to see them!
(Sadly the public won’t suffer such macabre deviance)
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I tried to nurse them into a proper poem
Into something respectable, passable
Its not my fault their so finicky
Its not my fault they shy away
From my dry sagging breasts
I’ve tried formula, every brand
I could get my covetous hands on
Plath, Rimbaud, Baudelaire
Even a little Poe
Snubbed all of them
If they ever managed a few drops
They spit them up right away
A sick greenish yellow blight
Pressed between the pages of idols
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I know the merciful thing to do
Would be too snuff them out
But I’ve grown queerly attached to them
Their fetid little cries ease the ache
Of emptiness, how I hate the blank page
The barren white of a loveless moon
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I keep them hidden in the cellar
Sealed away in little bell jars
Their lifeless parts
Swimming in a fishy inkor
Inside their beveled glass womb
I watch them sour with shame
If only I could stitch them together
But they won’t fit together properly
Every one of them has a different father
So for now they stew in darkness
My unfinished poems
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(This poem was inspired by Sylvia Plath’s poem “Stillborn”. I loved the concept so much I wanted to work with it. I can’t do justice to her obviously but she’s the reason I started writing. I know its horrifically long but I had so much fun. http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/sylvia-plath/stillborn/)
mindlovemisery 