Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton
Anne Sextonwas an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Themes of her poetry include her long battle against depression and mania, suicidal tendencies, and various intimate details from her private life, including her relationships with her husband and children...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth9 November 1928
CityNewton, MA
CountryUnited States of America
My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right.
Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.
Well, one gets out of bed and the planets don't always hiss or muck up the day, each day.
I have been cut in two.
Oh, darling, let your body in, let it tie you in, in comfort.
My heart is on a budget. It keeps me on the brink.
The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light. The glimmering creatures are full of lies. They are eating each other. They are overfed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.
I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind
And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself
I suffer for birds and fireflies but not frogs, she said, and threw him across the room. Kaboom! Like a genie out of a samovar, a handsome prince arose in the corner of the bedroom.
And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope
I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...
Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.