Found Poems, Plath’s Journals, Part 6

VI.
 
earth is the communal embodiment
of the individual.
 
I’ve got earth in my bones,
a synthesis of human and environment,
 
a combination of opportunity
grown in the shadows
cast by hillsides, hospitals, and homes
 
(we do not call them graves).
 
                     ***
 
life kills off
what good there is to living—
 
this is one of many stories
you can read in people’s faces,
 
clear as the borrowed words we scrawl
onto euthanized trees – our tedious records
of poems, breath, sleep.
 
                     ***
 
sometimes,
 
I slip from the script
and dance in the wind
 
till my feet become a blur of voices
and streets
rush by like phrases
of imperfectly-remembered childhood songs.
 
                     ***
 
at other times,
 
I am a drowned cat awakening
to the life-darkened certainty of resurrection.
 
fragments of each day creep into the next—
this familiar feeling
of spinning tires,
of unconscious compensation for lost control,
 
a weak, hard creature
unraveled by chemistry,
 
a fugitive from the old fears.

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used Plath’s journals (can’t remember which pages, probably ~45-52) as sort of a word bank, picking out words that caught my interest, then rearranging them and sometimes adding my own words or phrases. I’ve been stuck on this one for a long time, but finally got it into a somewhat coherent form.