Playing Opossum: Poems of a Neurotic Southern Girl

By Jessica Wesley

Enclosed are personal poems from a dark chapter in my life. These writings, rough-hewn as they may be, helped me navigate through the pitfalls of anxiety and depression. In short, this poetry isn't about dahlias blowing gracefully in a field. You want that, look elsewhere. It fulfills the adage: If it doesn't bleed, it doesn't read. JLW

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365462276

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Playing Opossum: Poems of a Neurotic Southern Girl

Playing Opossum: Poems of a Neurotic Southern Girl

Jessica L. Wesley

Table of Contents

The Ethereal Slithering

The Channel

The Resignation of Firelocks

The Pedestal Women

Denmon Blues

Gumdrop Profundity

Secret Sin

Baseless

The Key

Succubus

Stealing the Firstborn

Pane

The Stories that Were Never Written

The Death of Dixie

The Rainy Halloween at Hickory Trail

House with the Pink Kitchen

Smart Fish

Oval Orange

Ode to my Period

The Struggle

Why She Had to Die Alone

The Shame in Feeling Nothing

The Blow Torch

The Lake

Productive Millennial Citizen

Sensations of a Simple Summer

The Ethereal Slithering

The pendulum of passion oscillates,

as ribbed rhythms

erupt

on the velveteen wall.

A sudden inkling is felt on the crest of something.

It is wielded more power

than deserved.

There is a maddened howling in the dark.

One of pain?

Pleasure?

Both perhaps?

Fiction personifies in the dark,

slithering through the iris much like lightening.

Peals of thunder follow.

A clenching is felt, a union.

The unyielding mount gives a thrust.

A taste comes to the mouth, brackish.

An old life full of old qualms passes away with

each

bated

breath.

Then like quick sand in the midst of the most deserted desert,

they are consumed.

Together they shall now rise,

together they shall now-

fall.

It is a gasp of a new air-

epitome of all things shifting.

And the pendulum of passion oscillates,

oscillates, oscillates, oscillates-

at peace with none a prying eye.

The Channel

I am so deeply immersed in it now,

that I fear it’s all I am.

I can’t stay on a level.

Moment’s pass: livable,

but are always followed by those that aren't.

The thoughts in my head,

wicked little creatures,

lice to the mind.

They multiply beyond my power.

Like bacteria in a pea-tree dish,

an uncontrollable mitosis.

I can’t keep a handle on it.

My head is like a bad channel,

full of skips and static.

None are sure what program is on-

neither