Impossible? That's Nothing.

Elm

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root; 
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there. 

Is it the sea you hear in me, 
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?

Love is a shadow. 
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse. 

All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously, 
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing. 

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons? 
This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic. 

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek. 

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radience scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go 
Diminshed and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me. 

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. 

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me; 
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrevables? 
Is it for such I agitate my heart? 

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face 
So murderous in its strangle of branches?—

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults 
That kill, that kill, that kill. 

- Sylvia Plath

Monologue at 3AM

Better that every fiber crack 
and fury make head, 
blood drenching vivid 
couch, carpet, floor 
and the snake-figured almanac 
vouching you are 
a million green counties from here, 

than to sit mute, twitching so 
under prickling stars, 
with stare, with curse 
blackening the time 
goodbyes were said, trains let go, 
and I, great magnanimous fool, thus wrenched from 
my one kingdom.

- Sylvia Plath

A Mad Girl’s Love Song.

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”

- Sylvia Plath