Chanelling Sylvia Plath

or something. Written sophomore year of college. I want this one to be edited and polished but I'm so weirded out by my own adolescent writing I don't even know where to begin.

Aleph

I feel sterile,
in this sober skin without rain
how it stops two inches before striking my bones.

How the prayer never reached my lips this morning,
laying dormant on my tongue and
waiting for breath to strike the chords
or the scratch of a pen for repentance.

Now the children in my stomach are sleeping,
rolling over in their watery graves
like bodies trapped in the hull of a riveted ship,
the sunken bed frames and cradles,
the coffins inside the lagoon,
their filmy eyes sewn shut by empty veins,
the vertigo of falling forever forward
in the knowledge they will never be born.

The planets hang like cells in a womb,
they roll over each other forever,
waiting for God to give birth and
they throw their open palms upon the sky
and scream out with gaping mouths,
swallowing gravity and the center of cells,
their grief spilling over their skins like a cloak,
waiting for breath and for rain and ignition.

In the silence of morning life hides
itself like a virgin from death.
Beneath a thick fog between buildings,
the city pulls the cold up like a blanket
barometers break from the weight of a prayer
whispered over coffee in cups on a saucer,
the glass of car windows steam and the world
is so quiet with reason.

Beneath the steel legs of a street lamp
I confuse the pulsing of veins for small kicks.
Saturn in it’s screaming spin is a planet aborted by God,
frozen and useless like cells pulled from my stomach
by clean, metal tools, dangled on the end of a wire.

I squint in the dim lights with their starry stretch,
the walls of my womb collapsing from the sound before all sound –
the murmur in the back of a throat,
the earthquakes and mountains quaking,
God spoke from a bush and it wasn’t the words
but intentions,

how I meant to hurt you when I did,
laying smoldering coals beneath both your feet and standing
with smiles on the opposite side
smoking on cigarettes in my sterile purity
of white skin and bones,
swearing to you that like God
or a city I am impenetrable,
my teeth with their serpent tongue
beckoning from beneath it’s red roofed house.
I had no intentions when starting,
the themes lost in translation from chemical
to nerve into action, the technical terms
and my marble encased legs,
standing spread on top of tall towers
while my children yawn in their catacomb cells
except one.