Kurt Cobain

Kurt Donald Cobain (1967 – 1994)

Everyone that knows me knows that I’m completely committed to your music and your style- but you had to go and kill yourself.

The lyrics to every single song you sang, and the way you sung them, reminds me of the genius of insanity, Roethke's poetry, the movie Dreamscape, and the color black … and I dig the hell out of all of it- but you shouldn’t have killed yourself, dude.

I wish you were still here, producing more excellent hits, doing more ‘unplugged’ concerts, and pouring more creative audacity into the mixing bowl. But you’re not. You would have been 45 years old today. It feels awkward and creepy to want to say happy birthday to you considering your death … and so, I reluctantly wont.

Really though, you shouldn’t have killed yourself …

Beneath the Mask

The story behind the poem below is a tragic one, and true. A ‘father’ throws acid on his daughter’s face which leaves her disfigured. In a course of time she develops a deep level of depression from the abuse she suffered at the hand of her own father, and from the notion that she will never be beautiful again. Reeling in disparity, she takes her life. Very sad.

I first heard this piece performed a couple of months ago by one of the most gifted spoken word poets I’ve ever met, Cassidy Belville. I was left in awe at its delivery, and finally got the courage to ask Cassidy if I could post it here. Without skipping a beat she said yes. I was (and am) totally honored that she did so.

About the poem itself, it’s a really good read; but when I heard it performed by Cassidy at the pool I was blown away! The deliverance of it was perfect, the internal rhythm and cadence were astonishingly harmonic, the constant back and forth between ideas (life vs. death) made one feel the existential struggle the poem puts forth, and the subject itself was both breathtaking and tragic at the same time.

Now, I’m a writer of poetry, not a performer or spoken word poet. Cassidy is both. I’ve heard a lot of poets deliver their pieces before- and deliver them well- but I was utterly floored by the gravity of Cassidy’s gift to write and recite a work of art such as this- pure talent. You’ve got to read this poem and let me know what you think …



Beneath the Mask

R.I.P. Katie
Death? Unpreventable. Suicide? Pathetic.
For one who regrets with a life that's less? Death? No.
You are a breath,
Even if it's a mind going crazy on meth, it is not death! It's life. And for
those who give it up with the stroke of a knife, listen Tony plight.
For this girl gave her life for a reason. She had a father of treason.
The liquid of acid threw her porcelain skin to acid,
In a hospital bed she lie, because of the one that said the lie,
The lie, that made her die.
We have life. Does she? Yes, she survived.
However her face she has to hide under a mask that divides, her beauty
from her life. Who wants that life
A mind bent on suicide? Because she died.
An act of breaking of what that mask was making.
Suicide? Some may say so. But for the ones that know,
She is a victim of death because it was her time to go. So next time you
take that knife to your wrist,
Think of the girl that lived the life of a risk.


Thanks, Cassidy ... this is a very touching piece.

Touch the Sky

Touch the Sky

A Poem in Gentle Dedication to Anne Sexton

She wants to walk the clouds aglow
To negate flesh and touch the sky
She thinks- I think- it’s bliss to die
To flee this sleepy earth below

It’s life, not death, she deems the foe
And earthen truths she deems the lie
She therefore towards the heavens ply
And goes where scarce others go

One wonders why she wishes so
Why she would walk where wrens would fly
The truth is that I don’t know why
The truth is … I don’t want to know

-jwm



Poetic Parameters

Stanza: Quatrain
Meter: Tetrameter (i.e. 8 syllables per line)
Rhyme Scheme: abba abba abba (Italian quatrain in repetition)

Sexton on Plath's Death

Plath and Sexton were friends who shared several things in common: they were both woman; they were both roughly the same age; they were both exceptional poets; and they were both living a tortuous life of mental depression which, as a result of it and an intense obsession with death, caused them to kill themselves.

The women talked often with one another of their ills, particularly of their deep desire to die. It seems, to me at any rate, that, along with their poetry writing, they were somewhat therapeutic for one another ... but not therapeutic enough.

On February 11th, 1963, Plath ended her life. News of her friend's death must have reached Sexton quickly, for just six days later she scripted a poem (a sort of elegy) in memory of her friend. Here's that poem:


Sylvia's Death
for Sylvia Plath

O Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and spoons,

with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in a tiny playroom,

with your mouth into the sheet,
into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,

(Sylvia, Sylvia
where did you go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about rasing potatoes
and keeping bees?)

what did you stand by,
just how did you lie down into?

Thief --
how did you crawl into,

crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,

the death we said we both outgrew,
the one we wore on our skinny breasts,

the one we talked of so often each time
we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,

the death that talked of analysts and cures,
the death that talked like brides with plots,

the death we drank to,
the motives and the quiet deed?

(In Boston
the dying
ride in cabs,
yes death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)

O Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummer
who beat on our eyes with an old story,

how we wanted to let him come
like a sadist or a New York fairy

to do his job,
a necessity, a window in a wall or a crib,

and since that time he waited
under our heart, our cupboard,

and I see now that we store him up
year after year, old suicides

and I know at the news of your death
a terrible taste for it, like salt,

(And me,
me too.
And now, Sylvia,
you again
with death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)

And I say only
with my arms stretched out into that stone place,

what is your death
but an old belonging,

a mole that fell out
of one of your poems?

(O friend,
while the moon's bad,
and the king's gone,
and the queen's at her wit's end
the bar fly ought to sing!)

O tiny mother,
you too!
O funny duchess!
O blonde thing!

February 17, 1963


Tragically, on October 4th, 1974, Sexton, like her friend, ended her life by asphyxiation.