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
Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.
Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.
Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and 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.
Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?
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.
I raise my pelvis to God so that it may know the truth of how flowers smash through the long winter.
In a dream you are never eighty.
One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.
When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.
Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.
I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.
this is no dream just my oily life where the people are alibis and the street is unfindable for an entire lifetime.