We Who Wrestle With Sylvia
I do
pub poetry at my Urmston local.
It’s wholesome,
a monthly welcome,
like blood.
Refreshing, it ain’t no karaoke,
set in a mulled wine mug
of a snug.
We talk bollocks
and read with cajones.
One week, we tell origin stories:
pint-size superheroes
with the power
of front-door poems…
I’m teleported to
an alley in the hills,
direct like a sentence
from the corner shop
to the college bus.
I’ve bought The Grauniad
with pocket shrapnel
for its pamphlet of Plath.
Her blurb’s drawn me.
I’m peeking,
impatience fingerish;
she’s whispering secrets
with delicious violence.
For a song of a moment,
whose swell never leaves me,
I stand, coloned on cobbles:
gaping.
Fast forward –
two words, horror:
Cambridge interview.
I’ve dolled up in bad advice
to masquerade as a
19th century chick.
It starts:
“Well. What about Jane Austen?”
“Oh whadabout Jane Austen,”
it finishes.
10 seconds in.
The clock’s a stanza break
so white-vast it hurts,
like sun on snow.
“I see you’ve studied war poetry.
Pick a poem. Any poem.
Any non-war poem.
Discuss.”
‘Daddy’ pings to mind
but not to brain.
My accent’s thick as trenchmud,
thoughts barbed wire limbs.
Urm. Is ‘Daddy’ a war poem…
I fail
because I don’t yet know
I am a poet
with an engine of a heart
and no bonnet.
Sylvia does.
Memories of 20s
are magnets of madness.
Somewhere among:
- a closebook brute
called Hughes (no kidding)
whose red bed I never fully leave;
- drawers and drawers
of psych patients
screaming even
through socks;
- cloakrooms of doctors
prescribing outta hats
(one produces a printout
of Jacob and the Angel -
true story);
- blackout hours
drugged under-desk,
dying for a siren;
- ICU, OD, ED, A&E,
heartbeat BD BPD BP…
I start to pen,
shockingly,
Plathora of poems.
I wrestle “me, me” meaning,
I wrestle forms, feel breath,
I wrestle darkroom darkness,
I wrestle death, with sex,
I wrestle to be brilliant,
I wrestle lies, confess,
I wrestle bad-dads, umMums,
blackdogs, say-mania,
I wrestle I
wrestle I
wrestle
I wrestle with Sylvia.
Back at The Barking Dog,
I spin this quasimodo quasi-myth,
my creation origin.
Laid on my Docs
is Sylvia –
a black lab puppy
wagging a bone.
Holding my hand
is a direct sunshine man
who’s no fan of verses (honestly).
He springs me:
“So, Plath only got one phase,
no difficult second album,
no rose period,
no born again God”.
Of course –
she wudda developed,
like colour photos
of colour cities,
a master mage page planner.
I’ve developed –
squall surveyor
raging against
cages of night,
to dwelling in these
little houses of light.
So: to odes of poets in pubs
and rooms of pubs in poets,
to our Sylvia’s shadows of sonnets:
let’s raise a pen –
to toast.