Sylvia Poem by Alexander Roussel

Counting the red stars, plum-colored ones too –
Wishing they’d all fall out of the sky like a rainstorm.
Can’t seem to get life to fit together properly.
Always blamed for taking the wrong form.
No matter how much glue is pasted on,
The pieces won’t stick – is all hope gone – for you?

Sylvia – Oh, Sylvia,
That raven-tamer with his blackbird cunning –
Entranced your artist’s core with visions of well-penned
Adjectives dripping with honey –
He was the poet. He made the money.
At least that is what the critics would bark.
With you – shrunken-down to only the wife, the missus –
His domesticated, happy lark!

Domestic life tried to catch you in her barbed-wire snare,
Nearly took you over – taking and taking and devouring –
Until you were barely even left standing there!
An engine – locomotive, powering right thorough the soul,
Endless cycle looping ‘round the void, never filling the hole.

Oh! Sweet torture of the social graces –
Oh! Lovely sink of crusted dishes, piles of dirty laundry –
And those children with their never-clean faces!

Sylvia – Oh Sylvia,
Shout you killed one man, shout you killed two –
How were we to know – the one man – would be you?
Something’s cooking – forgot to light the fire!
Nothing left to ignite your inner poet’s pyre.
Hollow vessel, emptied-out so the world may feed,
Only after you gassed yourself did the masses finally gather
At the feast you’d prepared – to read.