The page frees me in a sense, in ways I cannot describe. I write and that is my life. I am a mother and a wife, a lover, a poet, and I feel that is also just a part of my life. Sometimes the two meet and sometimes they do not. Sphere upon sphere upon another sphere. If depression happened in nature, what would we call it then?
Poetry is a god to me. When I write I am a woman on her own. Reality is out of the picture and it does not seem to count for anything really. It is never enough for me. I stand and watch the busyness of life, observing nature and most of all human nature and I slowly empty out. It is a useful exercise kind of like transcendental meditation. I know nothing about it. It is just something I read as a girl in a book long ago when I was at college and at the time, it was just too much for me to handle. The thought of going out of myself made me go numb and cold. It gave me the shivers. If I was, alone I would go mad with grief and rage and I would be that girl again.
I think I have been supportive. I have been encouraging. All I see is constellations in words and it is driving me sweetly out of my mind. I am the rabbit in Wonderland and there I go down that hole. There are people out there who have peace around them all the time. Why can’t I be one of those people? Life is a cruel trick. I want to escape from my reality. Women do not set out to alienate men. It is not their lot in life. Men and women are supposed to get along so they can walk down that sunny road, settle down, marry, have those kids, and start the modern family. Sylvia and Ted are just complex, endlessly searching particles bumping into each other for clarity like oil and water, like acid rain. Now we, the both of this ‘us’ that he keeps on talking about have this one thing in common and that is poetry and the goal was for us to work together but now it is working against us. I never dreamed that this would be kismet.
Last night I was electric. I told him where to get off and come hell or high water I am going to stick to it. So sticking to my guns, that is me. I put the universe under observation. To be a wonder, I sometimes long for that. To sparkle, to vibrate, to feel that there is enough in the world, to bask in the revelation that there is an abundance healing the world of all its iniquities through ritual, that there is healing across family bloodlines. I go inside. Inside the deepness, the thoroughfare of the sense, sensibility of female poets and what do I find there wherever I look. Boxes that are locked and keys that need to be found. My children are my everything.
Poetry has become my life work, my death of self, a force to be reckoned with steely-eyed determination, my love, my creative impulse and passion. It is the fruit of my spirit and the way of my soul. I have found the world, worlds really that exist in my consciousness, that state I can only reach when I am very still and quiet. The state I could reach when I was young. You only have that kind of inclination when you are young and you do not live in a constant state of denial of fear and the ego and insecurity. Therefore, I have found consciousness, that clear and fluid stream of thought that tends to linger. The heavenly creation of a dream does not. And when you wake up in the morning there is action and vision and doing your ablutions, brushing the curls out of your hair, there is a sense of orderliness in the routine. There is always something human. I must have courage now. This is not my first hurt.
I see myself as a poet and a female writer second. There is no contest. All of life is feeding ghosts that came before and after, running on your own personal velocity, the flow of poetic motion, a writer saying, ‘I need an ending to this’ blasting through his or her dream. Inside the mind/vision of a poet means going into the black and that there are always two possibilities within reach, life or death, feeding the gods of beasts or feeling ghosts near your fingertips, depression or feeling that you’re more normal, stable than the next person. I think I have found my ending. Once you are there you are running, running with scissors (and did not even know it). For writers all of life is childhood continued. As a writer, now is the time of my life. Sylvia write every day, that is the purest sum of parts of a writer. Do not edit. Do not censor yourself. Before you show ‘the work’ to anyone else, journal with intent.
When I enter the body of poetry a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction washes over me. There are explosions of tiny waves behind my eyes. My soul has made it thus far. I have to end the poverty in my mind but I find a cold comfort in the not knowing of things. If depression happened in nature, what would we call it then? Would it be organic in origin? In a marriage when it ends whom is to blame for its demise. Who is the culprit? On the approaching betrayal in any relationship, I have this to say. Lock down your heart dear and look away. It means that there may be something incomplete in the moving against the current of love. It means to love and die simultaneously. I think there is a theory behind light. When my body feels full of that stuff, the light, and the hidden energies in my aura, I feel as if I have free tickets to the centre of winter.
Loss is a hard fall. You are standing and then the world becomes something of a hallucination. Writing no longer is a task for me. Feeling broken is a splendiferous stain. Held up to the world it is my main inspiration. It packs it in, crosses thresholds, divides, and flaunts, what it is not is anonymous. In my writing, I do not have to don a mask and mask my pain. I do not have to filter my moods and then I turn to my reflection and say, ‘Bravo, Sylvia. You have done the impossible. Bravo.’ Perhaps it is true. I am behaving like a spoilt, coddled child. However, if I take him back what does that say about me, all my principles, the family values I cherish. People talk and what if they do. It is none of my business what they think of me, of us, of this wounded relationship. Poets do not know how to live. We only know how to die.
