forgone

Everyday, I am less, and less and lesser still

Disappearing with every spoonful,

The figure before the mirror, a wraith

Staring back with gaunt eyes

It never was, never will be

Beautiful.

Its hands a mere skeleton

Its mind muddled in memories

A quietude, the quandary of a thousand cries

Envelopes sealed in tears and sent

To the greying expanse, left unread

And they yellow and wither and waste away

The semblance of youth on its ashen face

Forgone.

Its nailbeds bleed blue

With every word it shapes

After months of listlessness

Mourning what spark it had

It glares into the pearly-grey

With its gaunt, dead eyes.

⚜

Author's Note

These days, I find myself consumed in petty corporate writing; the soulless, heartless kind meant to fill the pages like an ornament, merely pleasing to the reader, and without substance: where supposed 'patrons' of my talents impose deadlines and due dates on reports, and summaries and catchy catchphrases. 

In this meaningless haberdashery, I began foraging for stories in the history of literature to reclaim any semblance to sanity. 

Most of my favourite authors are male (Whitman, Tolstoy, Dickens, Rushdie, John Green, Murakami-the list goes on), but there's something about the way female authors express pain that comforts me. From various accounts of female poets, here's a collection of passages that stuck out to me on the evening of 21st January, 2023.

...

Thirty years before she died, Virginia Woolf was asking herself in marginalia, “Why do I write all about suicide and mad people?” Sylvia Plath answered that very question in her own way in The Bell Jar, “It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.” Elise Cowen, who is barely known outside the small circle of those obsessed with the Beat Generation, left this behind, in a notebook: “Alone / Weeping / I woke weeping / Alone / In black park of bed.” And the truth is that women have long poured over this work, obsessed with it, because they identified with it. As Dorothy Parker put it in one of her best (autobiographical) short stories:

She pounced upon all the accounts of suicides in the newspapers. There was an epidemic of self-killings — or maybe it was just that she searched for the stories of them so eagerly that she found many. To read of them roused reassurance in her; she felt a cozy solidarity with the big company of the voluntary dead.

As the writer Andrew Solomon once put it about a friend’s suicide, “Depression is a disease of loneliness, and the privacy of a depressed person is not a dignity; it is a prison.”

It wasn’t, after all, only Adrienne Rich’s frustration with suicide that made her speech so powerful. It was the way she managed to turn anyone’s identification with Sexton into a reason not to die.

Her poetry is a guide to the ruins, from which we learn what women have lived and what we must refuse to live any longer. Her death is an arrest: In its moment we have all been held, momentarily, in the grip of a policeman who tells us we are guilty of being female, and powerless.

In 1935, after living three years with a cancer she had been told would kill her within a year and a half, Gilman ended her life by inhaling chloroform. She left a letter, conventionally called a suicide note, which stressed her view of the primacy of human relationships and social responsibility (“Human life consists in mutual service”) and ended in the famous line: “I have preferred chloroform to cancer.”

At the time of her death, she left with her agent the manuscript of an article entitled “The Right to Die,” a defense not only of suicide but also of voluntary, non-voluntary, and involuntary euthanasia, requesting that it be published after her death. It was intended as a piece for discussion at the height of the euthanasia movement in the United States, before the horrors of the Nazi holocaust became known.

Plath used letters, often brilliantly, to master appearances. “I am the girl that Things Happen To,” she wrote to her mother, when she was twenty. “I have spent the morning writing a flurry of letters: all sorts, all sizes: contrite, gay, loving, consolatory.”

Her name really was “Elise Nada Cowen.” When I first read that, I thought this was some nom de plume she took on. But no, it really was Nada. “Literally it means Nothing – Nothing and Nothingness,” Elise told her friend Joyce Johnson with pride.

The following is believed to be her last poem:

No love

No compassion

No intelligence

No beauty

No humility

Twenty-seven years is enough

Mother – too late – years of meanness – I’m sorry

Daddy – What happened?

Allen – I’m sorry

Peter – Holy Rose Youth

Betty – Such womanly bravery

Keith – Thank you

Joyce – So girl beautiful

Howard – Baby take care

Leo – Open the windows and Shalom

Carol – Let it happen

Let me out now please –

Please let me in

She jumped from the window of her parents' home after she wrote this.

On another occasion, Elise wrote:

The Lady is a humble thing

Made of death and water

The fashion is to dress it plain

And use the mind for border