The Sylvia Plath Effect or
Dying Slowly While I Can
A Poem
The ghoul lifts me from my dreamless sleep; I think it is the third time this week.
Tired as only the dying could be, I pull my skin along with the sheets off from the bed.
My hands reach ahead for a purpose, a shift in the winds, a vibration other than the alarm
Going on and off and on and off, just as I wish my tears were. I cannot cry anymore.
I cannot remember the last time I did.
How much it hurts my arid iris to stand still, blinking away the remnants of life behind an act of normality.
I chase the apparition but lose track before the mirror; I am the only terrifying vision.
Years have won me since I’ve last stared into these opaque eyes; these treacherous rotten prunes.
I cannot blink too hard or they will burst out of their carcasses to announce
That I have been gently ingesting the sorrows of the world in the hope they will make me sicker than I am.
Moving towards the emptiness is not a problem; consuming myself less and less entirely, pulling my arms
And legs by frailer strands while entertaining the audience is not a problem;
Finding my mouth depleted of words and my guts depleted of movement, hollow and abandoned,
A nest of evicted vultures…None of that’s a problem.
It is not bleeding that drives me insane but the droplets, one by one, taking their time to patiently coagulate, that revolves a turmoil inside my head.
You see. Dying is fine. Is the slowly part that kills me.
Nobody can give me what I want because I want nothingness. The silence at the end of every sentence;
The way I’m left alone when everybody has finished their business with me and I’m to linger with myself
For a minute or two, before it all starts again; and I’m not even important. I am not even urgent;
But perhaps if I were it would be more gratifying to endure the agony of giving so much
Into these painstaking small tasks.
Everything seems to slip into this crack of mundane impossibility.
How absurd it seems to want for silence and life to be the same thing, to coexist, to destroy and recreate peace while the whole scenery goes undamaged.
I cannot hold myself in one place, because I’ve been told you cannot be both, sad and strong; Dying and trilled.
I have to pick sides, I have to proclaim a war between my lungs and my uterus.
So languid and tired, even my dreams are charging me to exist; I cannot sustain them.
Yet they fantasize around my mind, they feed me life so I won’t be able to quit.
Not yet.
Not that fast.
You see. Dying is fine. Is the slowly part that kills me.
© 2020, Giulia de Gregorio Listo. All Rights Reserved
