Innovation/Courage?

This poem ended up in a completely different place than I thought it would, but I like it like that, to just go with the proverbial/prosaic/poetic flow.

Thought: This is going to hurt me at the end but
I’m going to do it anyway- and so I could stop looking 

outside to place blame. With a rock in each hand,

I began beating them together repeatedly, saying- 

“This is how they discovered fire. This is how the world
really began as a place for us to thrive and develop all the

cultures, incredible scientific and technological advances,

the great movements within the circles of art and literature,

and music, and  the stock market, and the world we know."

It fascinates me.  The place that Something so suddenly 

exists where previouslythere  was Nothing. All as the result

of friction. I like how when you take two things that aren't

meant to fit together is the only way it works. 

Now, let’s smash our hearts together,  or grab onto the other's 

hand, but with vehemence, thinking of that rock, to see

if we, too, have the inspiration and spirit to change the tide-

o there is never a cessation of creativity or innovation,

be it scientific pr medical, linguistic and literate, 

mathematical or technological, and perhaps, even cultural.

So much has yet to be discovered and all I’ll never learn it.

I often wonder whether I will have the chance to witness

advances made by their innovators in years to come, and

that people in the years to come will also take for granted

finite and eventually arcane ways of doing things, because

after all ,we spend most of our lives working in the same way.

Maybe from this distance, it appears that what those people

in future generations will discover and innovate will seem 

small compared to what you once have done. It’s not. 

They are the same hard workers, within different parameters.

Self-destruction is easy and it is boring eventually. 

You could easily kill yourself right now, or you could

do it sitting right in this one place. 

I dare you to bite down on your own heart and look brave.

Repeat- I’m weak, I’m weak, I’m weak- whilst quietly

Feeling surer that you are strong and courageous enough

to chew up your heart and choke yourself. I mean, 

It’s not like it’s anything the world doesn’t do to us anyway,

Whatever- I might get some semblance of a poem out of this.

Cut up and amended Plath poem

Even the silence was silent, and it was you,
all up inside my head; I couldn’t quite make it out
that spring that came with a roar beyond and above
these figs, all looking so rusty, so ugly, the way
they plopped to the ground. some people getting less
and some more. I must not have always been like this.
There is something so demoralising about watching
the habits, gestures and behaviour of others;
I’d never once thought about it before.

But life is loneliness and one can never outrun it.
I am simply my own silence. I close my eyes
and hear the world in constant motion outside me,
happy, I have been inadequate all along.
I am my own silence. All I heard was the bray
of my heart- this is the song of a mad girl.

I need to fabricate an outgoing nature so
that I might gather the guts to want something.
There is so very much I want to learn, and
I came dangerously close to wanting nothing,
So from here and now, all that despair, the feeble parts,
every hellfire of every nightmare and each time
the blackness gallops in at night- I intend to live it,
feel it, and somehow find a happy home far from fire.

All the world I must have taken for granted,
viewing it through small cramped eyes, always so
introspectively passive and melancholy.
Now I’ve learnt more of it, I am not so easily fooled
by false faces dressed up and painted blue and red.

There is a way out and it’s not a constant, I know this.
From that despair and woe you can come ricocheting
towards a sense of fulfilment, laughter, and even hope.
The trouble is that we always boomerang back- but it’s
just a matter of time- for a time I believed in mermaids.

When you kissed me I felt my lungs fill like trees with
something beautiful but certainly annihilating.
Dying is arbitrary, Anyone can do it but why want to
even if there’s no meaning to be found and even if
madness itself takes you out on a moonlit waltz.

 A fellow student asked- who are you? I am. I am. I am.
A girl with horrible limitations, too many neuroses
and a desire for companionship, other than an illusory
feathered thing that sits on me nightly. She replied-
I don’t know who I am either, but why drives you?
I do it because it feels like hell, because it feels real.
Committing suicide is not creative expression, she replied,
and it’s not a statement, and you have a life to live, so why?
The words were released, held in since ten years old
when I first tried it; the words that I couldn’t explain.-

I guess you could say I’ve a call, I said. One moment
and she put her hand on mine, and lowered her voice
to a murmur, said, cut the telephone off at the root
so the voices won’t get through. I shut my eyes and
wondered if I had really made her up inside my head.

Not without trouble

Imagine: star-crossed, eyes crossed out.
That was the first time a thought came to me,
but so very short across my eyelids and while
you laugh backwards I only want to move forwards;
the poem will come but not without trouble.
I am always in trouble, Their favourite topic: my trouble.

Nightfall headfirst, wings rustling in the breeze,
feathers dripping fragrant in my hands; I begin to write.
Clipped wings, shining heroism; I continue to write.

Imagine: a girl leaving church and clicking her tongue
enticingly, telling me- bring yourself to speak and
take off on mountain climbs, feel the highest place
from where inevitably I will fall and scatter my heart,
my brain matter, having to piece matters back together.
A girl who didn’t easily take to being told what to do
by her own voice inside her head nobody else heard,
and it is asking: Why me? and Who are you?

Then, as soon as a glance, I’m a child on your knee,
freckles scattered out from underneath the floorboards,
tears dripping in ink onto the pages; I keep writing.

What I do want? A clear mind, a mighty pen, approval.
I do not want your castles unless there are flowers there
and I did not see a single petal, I had no sparkling drink
so wrote and watched the joy bubbling from your lips 
to the polished sound of a champagne flute.
What do I not want? To need as I need, to be as I am.
To know too little, to live too long. No, I don’t.

then I might know like water how to balance
the weight of hope against the light of patience

For you only know a heap of broken images