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
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.
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?
Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.
I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.
I raise my pelvis to God so that it may know the truth of how flowers smash through the long winter.
One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours.
In a dream you are never eighty.
Somebody who should have been born is gone.
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.
At six I lived in a graveyard full of dolls, avoiding myself, my body, the suspect in its grotesque house.
emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea...
Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.
Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.