Blue Was Better for You

It is mother’s day Sunday,
and I have read the chapter of Luke
before I opened the box sealed with dust.

Your journal is sealed with the emblem of an asylum,
your name written, chiseled into the top like a museum piece,
like red lipstick on the wall of the Musee Seppuku.

I can almost see its glass case next to Plath’s.

I am opening your words, gloveless,
a box of evils sprouting into the world like a red, red apple,
like a Thanatopsis on a forbidden tree.

I am always Eve.

I read your words crinkled like my reality,
each page numbered by psychologists like time,
like clocks waiting on God,
ticking like pretentious language,
altiloquence in the presence of ladies
talking of Michelangelo.

And I have prepared the coffee of my life as I sit here.
I prepared and measured it out in spoonfuls,
and my pants are rolled,

but my tears are not as pretentious
as my Prufrock facade.

You cannot spell. I cannot breathe.
You cannot live. I cannot die.

I have been reading the journals
of Plath like a Bible
thinking they were you,
reading the chapters and verses and now,
and now,
and now,
I am finally holding your words which are distorted,
which are incomprehensible through the bell jar of my tears.

You wrote:
Fuck the world.
Fuck the world.
Fuck the world.

So, I fucked it,
my hands shaking and numb like an orgasm
emerging from the oceans and land and atmosphere.
I fucked the world, Mama.

And it’s funny to see your journal
here lying next to Plath’s,
next to mine,
juxtaposing minds,
all unstable.

And although you live amongst the clouds now,
I am still stunned by surrounding matter,
still a great atom galloping like a mental nothing
through solid reality.

So we have spoken to each other now,
and now,
and now
through the written telepathy I so often speak of,
our journals mingling in comparable time
discussing life like two old women in rocking chairs.

(I have dreamt of sitting next to you
in their conceptual Heaven discussing
my day which was my life)

We meet today in paper chairs,
your words as bright as my name
written in red lipstick on the mirror
that stared back at you the night
you added to the red
with your pistol.