First Born Daughter Playing Therapist

A great Hope fell You heard no noise The Ruin was within Oh cunning Wreck That told no tale And let no Witness in

The mind was built for mighty Freight For dread occasion planned How often foundering at Sea Ostensibly, on Land

A not admitting of the wound Until it grew so wide That all my Life had entered it And there were troughs beside -

A closing of the simple lid That opened to the sun Until the tender Carpenter Perpetual nail it down -

Emily Dickinson, from Envelope Poems

November Graveyard

by Sylvia Plath

The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees Hoard last year’s leaves, won’t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn To elegiac dryads, and dour grass Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness However the grandiloquent mind may scorn Such poverty. No dead men’s cries

Flower forget-me-nots between the stones Paving this grave ground. Here’s honest rot To unpick the heart, pare bone Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton Bulks real, all saints’ tongues fall quiet: Flies watch no resurrections in the sun.

At the essential landscape stare, stare Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind: Whatever lost ghosts flare, Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor Rave on the leash of the starving mind Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.

do you miss me like i miss you?

do you feel the same heartbreaking pain as i do?

or is it only me who feels this way?

I think this weekend I’ll go on an alcohol bender

But at least drinks are free when you’re the bartender.

Circe Invidiosa by John William Waterhouse (1892)

I read the flecks in your eyes

like how a girl all alone

would read poetry.

.

Your eyes tell an odyssey

of the thousand lies you've heard,

each one a dark star.

.

Somewhere within your iris

there's an epic of pain and

love in equal parts.

.

Eyes like the night sky.

I see the galaxy and

wonder where I could fit in.

Calypso’s Island by Herbert James Draper (1897)