01c. 1951 ADWatch out for intellect,because it knows so much it knows nothingand leaves you hanging upside down,mouthing knowledge as your heartfalls out of your mouth.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
02c. 1951 ADDo you like me?”No answer.Silence bounced, fell off his tongueand sat between usand clogged my throat.It slaughtered my trust.It tore cigarettes out of my mouth.We exchanged blind words,and I did not cry,I did not beg,but blackness filled my ears,blackness lunged in my heart,and something that had been good,a sort of kindly oxygen,turned into a gas oven.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
04c. 1951 ADAnne, I don't want to live. . . . Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can't Live It. I can't even explain. I know how silly it sounds . . . but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives . . . locked outside of all that's real. . . . Anne, do you know of such things, can you hear???? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet . . . and yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can't, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong . . . to do it all wrong . . . believe me, (can you?) . . . what's wrong. I want to belong. I'm like a jew who ends up in the wrong country. I'm not a part. I'm not a member. I'm frozen.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
05c. 1951 ADWanting to Die Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.Then the almost unnameable lust returns.Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention,the furniture you have placed under the sun.But suicides have a special language.Like carpenters they want to know which tools.They never ask why build.Twice I have so simply declared myself,have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,have taken on his craft, his magic.In this way, heavy and thoughtful,warmer than oil or water,I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.I did not think of my body at needle point.Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.Suicides have already betrayed the body.Still-born, they don't always die,but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweetthat even children would look on and smile.To thrust all that life under your tongue!—that, all by itself, becomes a passion.Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,and yet she waits for me, year after year,to so delicately undo an old wound,to empty my breath from its bad prison.Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,leaving the page of the book carelessly open,something unsaid, the phone off the hookand the love, whatever it was, an infection.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
06c. 1951 ADDeath, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
07c. 1951 ADAs it has been said:Love and a coughcannot be concealed.Even a small cough.Even a small love.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
08c. 1951 ADI am stuffing your mouth with yourpromises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
10c. 1951 ADOnly my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
13c. 1951 ADThat’s what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn’t worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol followAnne Sexton / quote ↗
14c. 1951 ADThe grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survivesAnne Sexton / quote ↗
15c. 1951 ADMany women are singing together of this: one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine, one is at the aquarium tending a seal, one is dull at the wheel of her Ford, one is at the toll gate collecting,one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona, one is straddling a cello in Russia,one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt,one is painting her bedroom walls moon color, one is dying but remembering a breakfast, one is stretching on her mat in Thailand, one is wiping the ass of her child,one is staring out the window of a train in the middle of Wyoming and one is anywhere and some are everywhere and all seem to be singing, although some can not sing a note.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
16c. 1951 ADThose moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
19c. 1951 ADPut your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
20c. 1951 ADI am, to be sure, afraid that if you knew me that you wouldn’t love me. But this must be faced…I fear it in any relationship. Thus I am perhaps afraid to reveal facts about things…or to say too much for fear if I make too much noise you’ll drift away, pull down the shade of your ivory tower…and after that. Afraid, I guess, that I’ll loose you…I keep losing people.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
22c. 1951 ADThe rest of my room is book shelves. I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
23c. 1951 ADAnd what of the dead? They lie without shoesin the stone boats. They are more like stonethan the sea would be if it stopped. They refuseto be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
