Darker shadows

The Ex is bludgeoning my brain again. She is a lovely woman - passionate, vivacious, imaginative. She is also stark staring bonkers. It is a worry to me that so many of the women I have been drawn to over the years have proven to have such a broad streak of mental instability in their makeup. They are both damsel-in-distress and dragon at the same time; and my naive knight-saviour gets burned to a crisp every time.

There's an additional dynamic of creative tension between The Ex and me, in that we both like to write, share ideas with each other, are admiring and supportive of each other's work. Almost a Ted Hughes/Sylvia Plath kind of deal, I sometimes feared. Except that I'm not in the same league as Ted. Whereas she could be, one day, I think, better than Sylvia. She is far more profusely, eccentrically creative than I am - frequently producing lines that most of us would kill for. She is perhaps less good on overall structure or purpose, apt to get lost in the details and miss the big picture. Her judgement - or her confidence in her judgement - is sometimes not that good: she is a worrier, who will tease away at a phrase for months at a time - often, it seems to me, making it worse rather than better. If you polish something too much, you can wear it away to nothing. I am completely the opposite in my approach: I find first thoughts are usually best, and I trust my creative process. My best work usually plops out of my brain fully-formed, and I don't have to do much 'finishing' on it. That's not to say that there isn't any consideration of alternatives, a sifting and discarding of countless ideas and phrases. It's just that with me, when I'm on a roll, it happens extremely quickly and on a barely conscious level - and mostly before I put pen to paper, not afterwards.

So, I suspect she envies me my ease and confidence of composition. And I envy her her wilder imagination.

In fact, I once sent her the SMS:

Haiku Bar again -
Envious of the better poet,
And missing her kiss.

I like the simplicity of that, the sincerity of the compliment, the romantic ache of it. A pity that it would be thrown out of the haiku court for overstepping the bloody syllable count. I told you those things are harder than they look.

Although - I hope - she lacks Plath's suicidal bent, she does suffer terrible depressions. And when they get bad, she often gets irrationally, incontinently angry as well - lashing out unprovoked at those closest to her. That's been happening this week. Nothing to be done, I fear, except sit tight and ride out the storm.

I hope there isn't a suicidal element in this, although..... there has been a definite strain of that in some of the best of her poems that she's shown me. The art is not necessarily the same as the life, of course. It better not be. I try to keep an eye out for her - without becoming too solicitous or protective (she hates that!).

Since I met her, I have been infected (fruitfully!) with some of this darkness within her, and have taken to writing quite a number of suicide-themed poems myself. This little piece, in particular, was written in honour of her.


little black dress

she went to her wardrobe full of shadows
and picked out the darkest one to wear
as black as night
as black as death
as black as hate
as black as fear

later, all the morgue attendants commented
on how sexy she looked