Channeling Sylvia Plath Poem by Briony Nicholls

Stasis. Darkness. Black blood flow.
Skies sheeted and overcast with the
Gloom of paralysed inertia.
The pale pallor of my face casts its own long dark shadows
On a world that soon forgets and is
Wearied, without the slightest interest in you.
The hand gropes blindly in a fool’s errand
Of misplaced optimism. Doom spills and flows while

Dead autumn leaves signal the onset of the great stasis
The greying and blackening of the skies
Naturally folding away flowers in
The great exodus of life!
The wide plains soon a mass grave
Carrying with it an air of undying purpose and no remorse.
It is pointless to resist, for it will hasten your demise
Nor can it be truly accepted, for you will fall deeper and deeper into

This bog, this pull of madness that thrives on the world’s unsuspecting innocents
Whose golden bare backs glisten in the light.
“We fit in nicely and survive”
Are the drone cries of the masses
Busily mounting merry-go-rounds of screaming delights
On a spinning whirl of electrifying escapades and
Sizzling momentary pleasures
Drowning out the old slow distant death knells,

Killing of with urgent need –-
The unstrapped, the unfenced and the unboxed
Dross of its yellowing frayed edges
Until lying shell-shocked,
A seaside rock with its heart all gone
I witness a great earth shatter and a splintering off
Into an erratic spinning-wheel world of - -
Dead boredoms, dead contingencies, dead stringencies

In a big blur, choking off all escape!
Until, years after, we scour the world like ghosts searching
For anything that might still stir, awaken and enliven.
The present, the sages say, can be the entry-point into a miraculous elimination
Of the grey slag-heap of a world that only knows how to grow uglier.
The great chaos of earth, wind, water & fire has seeped into my bones
But I cannot find the magical key and hence rest my soul on the dust-bin decay
Of the common lot that I share with the rest of humanity.

The myth of the exceptions titillate and soothe
For no other reason than to just know its existence in distant far away lands
The present however will not have it, being so barren and cruel,
It eyes me defiantly
Its yellow malignancies in full tow with the
Buried hopes and the seeds of everything -
It steals its way through -
Past the sleeping murderous false gods and noisy prophets
To show me its own irresistible carnival of personalised possibilities.