“I am, I am, I am.”

Oh Sylvia, with your words of gold and your thunderstorm heart;

 She whispered her poetic harmonies to me with her dead eyes and trembling hands.  

I repeated this phrase over and over again to myself, “I am, I am, I am.”

Who am I? Sylvia grinned at me from inside the oven,

Wondering the same thing in her last moments.

Am I my crooked smile or what moves my heart to spill tears down my face?

Am I my bruised legs or my barbwire heart?

Am I my clenched fists or the way I laugh when I think no one is watching me?

Am I everything, all of these, am I none of these at all?

Give me answers, answers, answers.

Sylvia, Sylvia, Sylvia, who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

And she laughed and told me she doesn’t have a clue,

Everyone looks to her poetry, sees her life as a beautiful tragedy,

Girls everywhere romanticizing nothing more than brilliant insanity.

“I don’t know,” Sylvia told me, “And you will never truly know either.”

And she held me while I cried,

Her ashy hand held my cold one, and her burnt, scarred skull of a face rested upon my head.

We sobbed together because we don’t know.

We don’t know who we are. And we never will.