plath unhinged THE COLOSSUS I shall never get you put together entirely, Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles Proceed from your great lips. It's worse than a barnyard. Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser. Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of lysol I crawl like an ant in mourning Over the weedy acres of your brow To mend the immense skull plates and clear The bald, white tumuli of your eyes. A blue sky out of the Oresteia Arches above us. O father, all by yourself You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum. I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress. Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered In their old anarchy to the horizon-line. It would take more than a lightning-stroke To create such a ruin. Nights, I squat in the cornucopia Of your left ear, out of the wind, Counting the red stars and those of plum- color. The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue. My hours are married to shadow. No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel On the blank stones of the landing. sylvia plath 010102 ... scheherazade 'plath' is a disagreeable noise. a bit like 'plah', similiar to 'pfaff'. "what did you think of soandso's new haircut / that coffee / this sentence?" "plath" use it in a sentence today. 010818 ... unhinged LADY LAZARUS I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it --- A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen. Peel off the napkin O my enemy. Do I terrify? --- The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? The sour breath Will vanish in a day. Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade. What a million filaments. The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see Them unwrap me hand and foot --- The big strip tease. Gentleman, ladies, These are my hands, My knees. I may be skin and bone, Neverhteless, I am the same, identical woman. The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident. The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call. It's easy enough to do it in a cell. It's easy enough to do it and stay put. It's the theatrical Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout: "A miracle!" That knockes me out. There is a charge For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart --- It really goes. And there is a charge, very large charge, For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy. I am your opus, I am your valuable, The pure gold baby That melts to shriek. I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern. Ash, ash --- You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there --- A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. 010818 ... paste! neruda and plath in the same day? i think i have a crush on you. 010818 ... unhinged i cannot take credit for neruda. that was all the workings of noah. he has that way about him. 010819 ... bloodjetpoetry death goddess. cookies and milk left behind. towels stuffed under the door. how i wish i had been your child. i think i made you up inside my head. the blood jet is poetry it cannot be stopped you hand me two roses two children 011119 ... unhinged there is a charge alright...she just forgot to mention that i'm the one being charged 011120 ... crimson The woman that Ted Hughes left Plath for committed suicide a few years later the same way as Plath: she put her head in an oven. 030815 ... shoccolo plath is a coward, and an imbecile, despite being a prominent figure in modern literature. after all, understanding the world means finding a way to exist in it, without it affecting your personal notion of truth. 030815 ... oldephebe I'm so glad I came across this page - I've always been kind of darkly awed by plaths writing, very dark, and some of it resonated with me - that sent this discordant shimmer oscillating through my fundamentalist mores poetry, man - these days it's one of the few things that generates a truly authentic response in ah me. (awkward construction, so what else is new?) 030815 ... pipedream i've always loved plath...but i agree with schoccolo up there- suicide is a cowardly thing to do, but im surprised nobody did anything about her repeated attempts to kill herself; maybe nobody cared after all... i've loved that blend of arrogance, anger and angsty darkness that plath exudes; her juxtapositioning of words and images into a unique web of fascination...she's like a large cat pacing around in a cage and hurling itself against the bars again and again. apparently she wrote with a thesaurus in her lap. 030816 ... oldephebe yep 030816 ... oldephbe my god! I have just started getting into Plath and *pipedream* thankyou for introducing me to this wholly original, redoubtable, powerful, fierce female voice!! Her wholly innovative juxtapositions (i like the way you ah described her style) set(s) upon ones soul like a seige, and a not unwelcome one at that - brilliant, trajic, and yet brilliant (the exhaling meteors across the sky kind of brilliance! ) and ah I find reverberations of dadaist deconstruction in some of her writing as well - sort of like smearing anarchic swathes of the rhetorical equivalent of fecal matter (god I am so uptight some times, everything must be primly qualified and ameliorated by polysyllabic obfuscation!) all over the totems lining the patriarchal pantheon - just brilliant - sure exasperating diachotomies yeah but still nonetheless a primal, primeval incandescence - exuberance - fury - a not unconsiderable cognitive reach - makes me kind of embarassed to re-read some of my scrawl upon the wall now hers' Is a voice that could truly rend stone towers into splintered surrender - what a truculent soul i am feebly scratching at the oak doors edge - i am stubbing my talons against its towering implacable breadth - later 030816 ... oldephebe relentless inner critic: Hey chief! it's spelled oldephebe 030816 ... shoccolo i love plath's work - she is beautiful and insightful. though we can find enlightenment in her writing, we cannot find it in her example. the tragedy is, perhaps no one listened to her repeated notions of despair, but i think it's entirely possible that she told no one. wanting to die is a very hard thing to discuss with the people who love you, when it's a reality in your mind. she was brilliant. she suffered a lot of grief, knowing things she had no control to surpass, in life. there was only one way out. i call it cowardly, because she deserted the people who needed her most - her children. if anything, they were her only reason to stay strong... 030817 ... pipedream actually...when you write like she did, there isn't any voice louder than that. i think either people were still of the notion that killing yourself is just not a real possibility- something that YOUR people do- or just that nobody cared. her kids were too young anyway. and oldphebe: you are very eminently welcome ;) tragic (the typo tweaker strikes again!) 030818 ... oldephebe Birthday Present What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful? It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges? I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want. When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking 'Is this the one I am too appear for, Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar? Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus, Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules. Is this the one for the annunciation? My god, what a laugh!' But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me. I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button. I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year. After all I am alive only by accident. I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way. Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains, The diaphanous satins of a January window White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory! It must be a tusk there, a ghost column. Can you not see I do not mind what it is. Can you not give it to me? Do not be ashamed--I do not mind if it is small. Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity. Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam, The glaze, the mirrory variety of it. Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate. I know why you will not give it to me, You are terrified The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it, Bossed, brazen, an antique shield, A marvel to your great-grandchildren. Do not be afraid, it is not so. I will only take it and go aside quietly. You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle, No falling ribbons, no scream at the end. I do not think you credit me with this discretion. If you only knew how the veils were killing my days. To you they are only transparencies, clear air. But my god, the clouds are like cotton. Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide. Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in, Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million Probable motes that tick the years off my life. You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine----- Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole? Must you stamp each piece purple, Must you kill what you can? There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me. It stands at my window, big as the sky. It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history. Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger. Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it. Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil. If it were death I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes. I would know you were serious. There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday. And the knife not carve, but enter Pure and clean as the cry of a baby, And the universe slide from my side. Sylvia Plath 030818 ... oldephebe full of glittering dead breaths - my god 030818 ... pipedream *blinks dreamily and tries to breathe* 030819 ... oldephebe her rhapsodies and allusions to death or to the diurnal impulses warring within her - I mean without those arrested immolations how pedestrian would her poetry be? I mean I haven't read much of her work but ah being a jazz saxophonist - i know that there are these unquiet fires that feed or inform my sometimes blistering treks into the undiscovered country, and I like it - I like going to the edge and seeing how and or if I come back - seeing what is wrought in the (improvisatory) kiln - and ah it becomes really hard for me to judge someone obviously plagued or haunted by these impulses that seared this indelible imprimature upon their souls - i can't step inside their skin an taste their pain - umm I am not imminently qualified to render any informed insights upon the tempestuous mosaic that made up/constituted plaths genious - her restive mind - but for some strange reason I've been able to forge intimate relationships with artistic women who seemed to have one characteristic in common - they were either b-polar or manic depressives - maybe her fathers death at such a young age - combined with his obvious teutonic patriarchal tirades or exudations, helped to cultivate some of these diachotomies - like I said i'm not informed enough - just kind of blee blah blah ... blah. I haven't even begun to factor in her mother, single parent - academic and all that but her lines resonate really deeply - ah any way - I'd appreciate hearing some informed or intuited conjecture on the potential origins or impetus for many of the stark juxtapositions in her work, with special emphasis on her numerous allusions in "The Birthday Present" hmm that wine has a subtly juanty and yet ineffable piquance, let me ruminate upon it's topography - blah blah blah - how I do go on - later ... 030819 ... pipedream i haven't read your blathe through because im in a hurry- but you play jazz saxophone? that's SO fabulous; i wish i could play jazz anything... 030819 ... oldephebe oh but you do your riposts and ruminations have all the lyricism and rhetorical innovations of substantive improvisation - think about it - isn't it exhilirating when you begin at one place and then you find yourself suturing together these variations upon a theme - a somehow coherent collage of cogitation and extemporanaeity? some new wind or zephyr rushes unbidden and you find yourself typing words or thoughts or smilies in a new way? yeah free association but that's the ineffable essence of improvisation right? at least that's what fuels my cognition whether I'm in my prayer closet (figuritively) or emblazoning the wall with my scrawl - or trying to pitch the potentialities of say the latest vogue in group dynamics, or ((shudder)) management theory as it relates to impediments in the whole supply/process chain or trying to haggle a lower price out of someone - or reasoning or having the courage to be totally open and vulnerable to a sibling or parent or lover - you find yourself saying things your mouth never rehearsed - free association - yeah - so anyway when you get time, i'm really interested in your take on the whole nexus of plaths insidiously alluring evocations of death, or at least exasperation of life thing - i don't think anyone can really master or reach a decent level of musicianship on their instrument without first placing on the bridle of rigorous classical training - just like any great athlete must learn and master the fundementals of the game before he or she can truly master the game despite any athletic, balletic individual virtuosity - blah ... blee blee...blah - i think my lefe would be so barren without poetry - I thank God for those poets who stir me, or jostle me - who rip me from the tedium of regimentation and force me to apprehend the world anew later ... 030820 ... oldephebe Daddy You do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time ---- Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off the beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine, Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You ---- Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through. If I've killed one man, I've killed two ---- The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagersnever liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through. Sylvia Plath 030820 ... unhinged that was the one that was the plath poem that i've been looking for ever since she read it to us in class. she had a way of exciting me like hardly any other teacher in high school could. she picked out two of my favorite poets. she was a great teacher that always explored the cutting edge to get across to her students in a town where the doctor's and lawyer's kids were only in her classes to make it to the ivy league. she tried to turn me into a writer. she saw the potential i exuded for that even back in high school when everything about me was innocent and idealistic. i still remember the way she said the last line. and how i almost cried in the middle of class because too much of it reminded me of my own father. (although my fascination with death still hadn't arrived) i've been searching for this one ever since. thank you. thank you so much. this made my day. 030820 ... oldephebe Oh um you're welcome - there's tons of plath stuff on the web - i just cut and paste, no time to waste (oh the horror of pedestrian rhyme/doggeral I just couldn't resist) - so yeah er I just slapped her name in the old google noodle and a whole bunch of stuff came up - so i guess the thanks should really go to plath and to google 030820 ... oldephebe here's the impetus behind me pasting plaths "Daddy". I knew he'd died from diabetes when she was i think ten and that if he'd acknowledged the sickness, if he'd stepped out from behind his teutonic pride that allowed him to be misinformed, he might have lived into a modestly attenuated old age, or at least into his 7th decade, anyway i was looking for some thread, some poem that articulated the diachotmies of distance and desertion, not to mention her looking for Daddy in all the wrong faces kind of a thing, and ah this poem just popped up. Click and then poof - and ah yeah pipedream your right she used a thesaurus thats probably marginally responsible for her jarring juxtaposition -there is so much wealth in her writing - i've tried to read a few lines of critical analysis or commentary - but ah i get more understanding just by hearing a poems music - so again you're welcome and that was a particularly heart rending synopsis you gave unhinged - i guess your teacher was right later ... 030820 ... unhinged see, i have this thing about using the internet for productive ends...i don't. :) and while i guess i could have just as easily found it myself, the reason i love blather so much is sometimes other blatherskites seem to find just what i was looking for almost when i forgot that i was looking. mrs. lenk was an inspiration to me. i think that my continued fascination with writing is because of her. before i discovered the violin, i always wanted to be a writer. and i find myself wondering if that career doesn't work out, if words would serve me better. it seems like i'm always struggling with my violin. for the most part, words have a way of just tumbling right out. so oldephebe thanks again. it might have seemed little to you, but little things are the best things for me. 030821 ... oldephebe your words, your soul water streams, whet the brims of my eyes.. umm perhaps I was being brusque, please accept my apologies..wow the violin, are you playing with an orchestra at this point? or still studying, master classes and all that - much props to anyone who plays the violin - i had a few remedial string pedagoy classes in college - very, very daunting - i love writing for strings, and conducting - haven't conducted any for quite some time though - but i love how you can just subtly cue them for some paganinni-esque (sp) passage and the strings they are so cool, and they really understand conducting, musicianship, the whole interconnectedness - the first and second chairs will commend you, or tell you when you've screwed up - um it means a lot to me that it's significant to you, the ah plath poem - kaliedescopic discourse - yea, i was touched by what you shared on the blathe page i loathe myself (not saying it right) i loath and hate myself by sfl thank you for settting me straight about something that is important to you peace 030821 ... oldephebe pedagogy -geez 030821 ... unhinged well right now, my career with the violin is getting to the upper end. i just finished my undergrad in violin performance at youngstown state. (which totally blew because my teacher was to put it nicely 'lacking'; but i couldn't pass up a free education so i sucked it up and got out as fast as humanly possible. the old saying 'you get what you paid for' definitely applied to my undergrad experience) while i was in youngstown, i played with some amateur/ semi-professional orchestras like the youngstown symphony and the warren philharmonic. it was a truly decent gig for a college student. there were also some finer points to the school of music at youngstown state; every spring we produced an opera which i've come to find is pretty rare in most universities. this past spring we did madame butterfly by puccini (sp) and my professor finally gave me some dues by letting me be concertmaster. my most recent stuff has been a five week chamber music festival in milwaukee. i performed two entire beethoven op. 18 quartets and a movement of a janacek quartet. small conductorless ensembles are definitely the most demanding and nerve wracking, but also sometimes the most intensely personal things i've ever been involved with. the festival up here has amazing teachers/performers that i've been eating up for the past three summers. right now i'm starting my graduate studies at the university of wisconsin-milwaukee in string pedagogy. they have the most adorable program here that goes from three year olds all the way up to high school students. their program was developed by mimi zweig, josh bell's teacher among others. i have a friend who just spent the past two years going through the program and i think as far as my teaching philosophy goes this is a very good place for me. not to mention that there are now TWO amazing violin teachers here. one trained at julliard and in some famous german school in cologne and the other at the paris conservatory. so right now, me and my violin are looking towards some enlightening times. i just hope i can hack it. .... and all of this seems oddly out of place on the plath page. a definite blathercriticism of many, but boy do i love a personal question. i don't know how to reply to your words without sounding hoky, but thanks. thanks for appreciating my words. but i have a feeling i started a little fight over on that page and that makes me sad. i have been hoping and trying for tolerance for the most part but sometimes when i feel strongly enough about something i have a tendency to make myself look like an ass in some quarters. *shrugs* .... yes, sylvia resonants in me. even in a stronger way than when i first discovered her. i would deny the criticism that suicide is cowardly. i've already fought my fight about that on the suicide page. to people who operate on cool logic for the most part, yes it may seem stupid, cowardly, extreme, extraneous. but believe me, it takes a lot of courage to actually get up the balls to do it. and more possibly a lot of sickness. i have stared that monster in the face a few times in the past four years and every time it scared me away. and believe me, it wasn't that i wasn't ready to die, that i didn't want to. because there was definitely the will and the means. but i chickened out in the end. which may not be perceived that way to some, but i chickened out. i had the blade in my hand, i had the voice in my head, i had the visions and the itchy skin. but at the very last second the small part of me that was still wanting to be alive took over. and the bigger part of me that wanted it all to end was frightened away. i chickened out. and to actually stick your head in the oven and turn that shit on is by no means cowardly. maybe incomprehensible to you, but not cowardly. none of us know for sure what is on the other side and to willingly plunge yourself into the unknown to me is the sheer antithesis of cowardly. 030822 ... oldephebe umm wow! glad you finally found a decent teacher, and ah one from Juliard! and with a pedagological pedigree that wends its way through cologne, yeah i'd say you're definately on your way up - i get every thing you shared about suicide and your personal convictions sure, i get that - i think we all win when we can take the time and listen without out judging or striking before letting the words wend their way down past our predjudices or expectations or orientation - we all are expanded - i mean must we all becomed subsumed in someone else's expectorations? one sword to rule them all, one brush, one pallet, one shade to stamp them all - we, and i include me might want to considering developing a reverance for one another's uniqueness - and yeah this has nothing to do with plath - i enjoyed reading about your musical/pedagological exploits there is a real unassuming honesty to your words later, 030822 ... oldephebe my spelling is becoming even more atrocious 030822 ... blather spellcheck if your spelling wasn't atrocious i would have nothing to do around here 030822 ... oldephebe oh, i just remebered, have you ever listened to anything the Orpheus Chamber Ensemble has done? I ah sometimes listen to them on egghead radio - I would love to just observe one of thier rehearsels, their sound is more ..intuitive like Bernstein's conducting of Mahler, yet without sacrificing the mucianship of any first rate chamber orchestra - a very, very intimate sound - never seen them live though - ... 030822 ... unhinged i believe i've probably heard them. the classical station in cleveland where i used to live played them a lot. i really don't listen to a lot of classical music when i'm not playing it though. i like the rock 'n' roll. but tonight i listened to the festival recording of jeannie and claire play the d minor brahms violin sonata...now that was intimate. *shudder* two of the best chamber musicians i have ever heard. 030822 ... oldephebe Brahms! Brahms! I think his violin concertos are just these incredible helixes of dark and light, even the stuff that he notates as having written in a major key - to me not even Beethoven masters the coupling of melancholy and restrained mirth in a single line - that's just me - he's always really intriguing, diural, diurnal, he's so damned diurnal - yes i am bizaar fomenting over the mercurial brahms like this - and at 7:00am on a saturday morning - just wanted to let you know i think brahms is boss too - :o) later, 030823 ... unhinged bought her unabridged journals like a month ago. slowly wading through and now my early nebulous affinity finds reason. it seems slightly egotistical to identify myself with such a person, but reading her diaries at around my age and things that are still so close to my heart and recently passed ages... there_are_no_words_here when mrs. lenk told me i had the poet inside of me i wonder if she would be shocked to realize that most of it is sylvia now. strong enough these days not to stick my head in the oven but so much resonant blackness everywhere. even how she felt about relationships with boys; although she had the somewhat good misfortune of being somewhat popular with them. and the barber violin concerto is now my favorite concerto; somewhat like plath i think in possibly a little bit more brightened manner. i WILL play that piece someday. i will. it is MY concerto. (topical_divergence) 031126 ... oldephebe unhinged - what do you think of gwyneth paltrows portrayel of sylvia in the new movie? I haven't seen it yet..but i'd like to if it hasn't bell pulled from the theatres yet.. i don't think its egotistical or anything to identify so strongley with an artist of sylvias inner truculense. You've been kissed by twin muse's. That is an inordinate blessing and at times an albatross..curse. the soul whelped in fire..it is probably the seat of your art..in both realms. I so get what you are saying..I've often wondered whether or not i should have majored in classical lit..i used to write other folks theory essays in my sleep..but the compositional, style and form turgid tehnical stuff seemed always a little out of my reach. Like you I am at one with Mahlers emotional excesses..his music evokes and pulls something primordial up and out of you. Play out of your head and not i always wanted to say to people..when i would conduct..it's shimmering right there on the page. So her diaries are available. Um..whose the publisher? and i hope that damned hughes estate is not getting one red cent but it probably is. You write so wonderfully unhinged..i love reading your way too short musical ruminations and primers on style and form and musical history. I wish I'd read more of plath's stuff. There are a few sites with a sampling of her works. But i need to get my hand on a compendium or something. This is weird but even though i've just discovered her..thanks to you and pd, I feel so close to her words..like she's speaking directly to me..wierd i guess..for a guy several generations removed to feel this way..but..every time i read one of her beter poems something breaks open within..like some higher plateau of perception has been reached..like all the faux didactic and compensatory pedantry is being shorn away..enabling me to see the soul of the verse..i think more guys should read plath if they want to glimpse the inner workings of a womans heart..the horror and comedy...absurd comedy of her masquerade she seems to be trying to impart to us..i dunno..with each plung of her shovel into the unhallowed ground she seems to be uncovering the trough..filled with the squat and s**t of her unfullfilled imagination(s) of what a man should have been to her..music and peotry and screaming verses..these seem to be our two faiths which the viccicitudes and vagaries of an indescriminate Life, fate..(and fate yes she is a mercurial mistress)whatever seems to sparl before us..i don't know if sylvia plath is my favorite poet but at this stage she is one of the few voices that can reach me..cowering in my flesh cave..sometime i want to be wed..literally wed to her amazing verse..i want them to inhabit me and imbue me..i get her extremes, her fatalism, her crisis of faith, her impulse to defecate upon all the sacrsanct symbols that a patriarchal and not so heteroganous culture..whatever has erected as the follow the carrot and the dotted line to safely stapled in conformity and concession..the road to a really constrained graceless approximation of happines..status quo..and "don't you know?..yet death seems ever to keep pulling us down..be well unhinged..not sure why i identify so strongly with some of the things you write..but it may have something to do your libran cast of heart..i dunno but i'm kinda glad i stumbled across this site... 031126 ... oldephebe wait - meant to say.."play out of your heart and not your head" 031126 what's it to you? who go blather from