Hi readers. Someone female sitting in the lobby late one night tossed The Bell Jar aside and groaned a curse. Headed for the wagon yard, I reckons. So I picked up Plath’s tome and read enough to remember everything else I ever knew, ever wanted to know about Sylvia Plath. Most vividly I remembered a poem, Daddy, by Ms Plath. Some University of Texas poetry course caused me to write a ten page paper about it once.
I learned to hate the thought Sylvia Plath and her lot shared this planet with regular human beings. And after reading a while on Bell Jar, chunking it, I wrote this:
Virus of the mind
The drumbeat litany of hatred
And blame;
Of smug mindless naiveté
Numbs the mind.
Alienation is a welcome gift
From the universe
When it involves the inability
To identify with THAT.
The preoccupation with death
As though death is an unnatural state,
Created by a dark maker for the shallow purpose
Of providing a source of terror and sadness
For tiny humans;
Leaves me with a yearning:
Just once I’d like to see a poem
Just once.
A poem full of truths:
“I gave you permission
to hurt me and make me angry;
because of my illusions and expectations
you never agreed to satisfy
and didn’t
now I’m angry.
“I wanted you to behave a certain way.
Because I wanted it, I demanded it
In my expectations of you
without saying so.
“I wanted you to give up your choices.
I didn’t want it
because giving them up would make you
happier
Or more fulfilled.
I just wanted it because I wanted it.
“I’m used to getting my way.
I’ll hate you if I don’t get it.
“I’ll hate you fiercely
and if that doesn’t work
I’ll threaten to kill myself
Just to get you back.”
Or,
“I’m angry. I’ve always been angry.
Life isn’t fair and it pisses me off.
I haven’t gotten everything I want.
Sometimes my parents weren’t kind to me;
Didn’t give me what I wanted.
“I talk to my friends and they’re angry, too.
The more we talk the more we realize life isn’t fair
And it pisses us off.
“We talk among ourselves
About how cool it would be
To kill some of those flawed bastards
We don’t like.
“We savor our anger; our hatred
We wallow in it
And think of different ways we’d like to kill
The bastards we don’t like;
How much we’d enjoy killing.
We all know
Because took a voice vote.
“Some nerd who wears his glasses crooked
And isn’t cool;
Some football jock who gets all the girls
We’d like to get;
We hate the girls and the jocks.
“Some sarcastic adult who isn’t cool
And doesn’t respect our views
About how the world is.
“We’d like to kill them all.
We took a voice vote
And we all agree.”
“We haven’t studied much
Nor read much
Nor lived much
Nor listened much
But that doesn’t keep us
From knowing how life is;
How life should be.”
“We’re angry and we’d like to kill them all!
We took a voice vote.
“And by God you’ll see
You’ll be sorry
When I kill myself!”
And the Ted Hugheses of the world , the Daddys
Sort through selective memories to avoid the truth
About this creature they loved.
From Poems of the New Old West, copyright 2003 Jack Purcell
So Far From Heaven 