Old poems and older poems. The art in here is far more recent - all illustration tiles were made between April 20, 2024 and May 12, 2024.
Some of these poems were published in a chapbook, Eleusinian Mysteries, in 1995, under the pen name Sarah Maddo...
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I.
The black crinoline of oblivion brushes its tresses against her eyes; she floats. And her body is a ship sailing on to the west. A taste of wine sour in her mouth.
Waves of night lapping at the shores rise on a tide: engulfing night.
when the sun rises to illuminate her unconscious parallels, harsh rays on night-worn skin, the disappointment she feels is a still content - a content silent as marble.
Her mouth held open until the poison creeps out in a spittle of dawn.
Death will not be hers, this day.
II.
My beloved,
How to tell you that I am leaving? I cannot. My body will have to speak for me - not my spirit's surcease in death, that magnetic quest...But I do not really want to be free! I am confused, I no longer understand whether my death will free me or condemn me to an eternity of you. I long to ask you these things, oracle to omniscient, but you are silent. Only my heart speaks to me in these strange mists, writing like a restless python. Ah! half the hour is past! 'twill all be past anon! Oh God! In the wake of the sun's desertion, the only embrace remaining is that of darkness!
III.
How she clings to her illusions!
(I clung to him, then, my living god; barbiturates and antihistimines, painkillers and garlic wine, and too much absinthe made a steamy miasma in the confinement of his arms.
I did not tell him upon waking, nor in the midst of that final act of desire that I had taken an overdose;
merely that I wanted to die.
Life without him would not be life, but a living undeath, a hell without a sun.)
Perched openly on the tripod in expectation - but no visions come, only the empty caress of the unfulfilled morning. And all that come to her are methods: knives, ropes, liebestod, ways to ease the crossing
to let go of the life that she had so begged for.
(I wanted him so badly; I knew this was the end, the point of no return, and I wanted to make love to him before I ended my slavery...
That word! you cry. You never want to hear it spoken aloud. Nor did I, nor did he - we do not like to hear the naked truth, that we are slaves to our bodies, to our passions, we dream of escape. Is it tragedy that death eluded me? Mad sybil of a rejecting god)
