Inspired by The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
~
What if
the house was never
haunted?
What if,
all along,
it was merely the girl
who lived there,
shedding her ghosts like chrysalides
inside which sad, nightmarish fancies dwelled.
When the floorboards creak,
it is her waltzing
across the hardwood
as she slumbers,
the bodice of her romper
askew and revealing
her left breast.
Muscle memory box steps
her to the bedroom door.
A scream punctuates the air,
which is already heavy with
the scent of aged wood.
Girl lurches to consciousness.
She is barely able to
comprehend her terror
before she realizes the scream
is her own.
scared of your own shadow...
mama used to tease.
In her childhood naivety, the girl,
at the mention of the word "shadow",
and not fully understanding
that not all expressions are
to be taken literally,
immediately thought of
Peter Pan.
Really,
she was grateful that
she was not estranged
from her shadow like Peter Pan was,
that she would not have to bear the tortures
of stitching it back to the soles of her feet--
and even then, Pan was not afraid.
If anything,
he preferred to keep his shadow close.
Why wouldn't the girl
want the same—
why wouldn’t she
want a fairytale of her own?
Why shouldn't she romance daydreams
of mermaids and pixie dust,
of the starry-eyed notion
that the darkness is kinder
than universally misconceived.
As she rose towards
the apex of womanhood,
she would view life
as either a fairytale or a tragedy,
the two genres juxtaposed starkly
against each other,
never existing symbiotically
as she nosedived into the depths
of whatever story happened to unfurl before her,
her feet never reaching middle ground.
But over the passing of chronologies,
the magic captured in the fairytales
began to pulverize
until they were stripped
from the shelves altogether,
leaving grey, uninspired
rectangles of dust
in their wake.
Like the bones
jitterbugging in the closet,
she cracked away
the spine of a new story,
one that whistled
through the yellowing teeth
of the wallpaper
where the phantoms began
to unsheathe themselves
Pareidolia
holds her pupils hostage.
She sees them—
these faces
these eyes varnished
with a paroxysm of emotion
these hearts palpitating
against ribcage like
hooves against battleground
until at last they detonate
into showers of parchment
scrawled in anxious ramblings.
But like her screams,
these faces
eyes
hearts
belong to her.
She peers into the
metallics depths of
the wallpaper—
this is where the poems dwell,
their pages curling in horror
as they sit in the sweating palms
of whoever dares to read them.
(you.)
Image Source:
The Yellow Wallpaper gif (n.d.). [image] Available at: https://www.tumblr.com/search/victorian%20gif [Accessed 9 Nov. 2019].
#blogger #blogging #broken #darkness #demons #depression #disappear #dream #empty #emotion #existenialism #fairytale #freeverse #forgotten #ghost #haunted #heart #illusion #life #loneliness #lonely #madness #mind #nightmare #nothing #pain #pareidola #PeterPan #phantom #poetry #psyche #reality #sadness #slumber #shadows #soul #stories #story #TheYellowWallpaper #terror #tragedy #truth #writing
Comentarios