Left

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Bare electric nerves of the naked stranger,

The mirror repeats our terror.

How the ceiling reveals fierce faces

Blind with ambiguous shadow.

Familiar omens spawn beyond view,

Some accidental ritual,

The sea will plunge our shuddering dreams,

Blur us when the eye is glittering.

Ridiculous fabrication,

Accuracy demands the horror of fictions;

Our green future of waste.

In this minute of breaking,

Faith shatters us. 

‘Left’ is an erasure poem using as the source text ‘Tale of a Tub’ by Sylvia Plath, published in ‘Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems’, Faber and Faber, 1981.