My own poem I wrote about Sylvia Plath:

"Dying
Is an art, like
Everything else.
I do it Exceptionally
Well."

~~Sylvia Plath ("lady Lazarus")

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Girl Who Wanted To Be God

The bald fist of English winter
pummeled your soul.
It would not, would not,
cease the pounding,
lift or pull away.

You vaulted
humdrum walls,
shrinking around you.
What ultimate God-stare
prompted you to seal the door,
to climb into the tomb?

O surreal enigma!
Spouting dark dirge-consonants
that goaded your final triumphant blaze-
a controlled head-trip of pure motion
hurtling you into the eye, that red-eye magnet
long drawing, burning

in your brain, your veins, until
it consumed your flesh.
A bitter triumph, they say,
a brainstorm from which you failed to return.

O ironic victory!
When the fat black heart ceased its beat,
the virgin queen rose, reborn in God's eye,
liberated from her bald wax-tomb.

~~~~~Pam Patterson


And, one I wrote about a bleak time in my own life....

Aborted Reason

Slice-and-dice sound bites
chew on the worm-germ
infesting my slippery skull.
The vapid hunger feeds on itself.
Like an aborted cancer clinging to life
it crawls back into the belly
hook-pricks along its raw umbilical.

O the sweet-meat of death dreams:
tempting vapors that swirl and curl
deep into the night nostril.
Mad-mother wakes to the wail of her fetid fetus.
Contractions contort the brief sanity-slivers
that pierce the counterfeit labor pangs.

I am a victimless rape victim.
The bloody seeds of sanity
spill out from my spread-eagled soul.
The crime is mine. I asked for it.
I nurture the beast that feeds
deep in my fertile skull-womb.
I whored my shaky psyche
for a willful dance on reason’s edge.

~~~~ Pam Patterson