Trigger warnings: Suicide, Self-harm, Depression
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Sylvia Plath blew her head up in the oven
But much, much before that, she wrote
Verses that screamed of her sadness
Pages and pages of ink dipped in muffled screams of agony.
I think about her too much
About how it must have felt, to blow up
Evaporate. Drown. Disappear.
And I write too many poetry
Where I compare ink to blood
Words to screams
My body to a ghost.
An aftermath of a war
A haunted house.
But there’s only so much that 26 alphabets can contain
And regardless of how many metaphors I tie around this treacherous sadness
It is bound to spill over.
So I hide my pocket knives
Spend too much time in crowds
Stare at the words for too long
Reading them over and over
And over
Almost wishing my poetry
Would talk back to me;
But it doesn’t, and I end up
Spilling ink all over
The pages, My clothes,
My skin, My wrists-
I can’t differentiate between the colours anymore.
If only, if only
Rich metaphors could save a life
But all they do is cry out help
In such a fancy language
That it ceases to be anything more than art
And people tell me how beautiful my sadness is
Till I start believing it, too.
And I adorn it like a masterpiece, for everyone to see
Sing and write in it
Wear my trauma like an overcoat
Till it starts getting too heavy.
Sylvia Plath blew her head in the oven
But days before that, she wrote a poem
That cried out for help
And people declared it’s
one of the finest poems
She’s ever written.
This poem is written by Anupriya Dubey. She is an undergraduate student of psychology. She writes as a form of therapy and can be found in quiet cafes reading, writing or trying to figure out people’s stories.
Thank you! 🙂