Anne Sexton

Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.

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 find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year__ cupful and downward into a decade__ quart and downward into a lifetime__ ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman__ float.

I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.

God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

exI feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.

Depression is boring, I thinkand I would do better to makesome soup and light up the cave.

We were fair game but we have kept out of the cesspool. We are strong. We are the good ones. Do not discover us for we lie together all in green like pond weeds. Hold me, my young dear, hold me.

Do you like me?__o 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.

Taking into consideration all your lovelinesswhy can't you burn your bootsoles and yourdraft card? How can you sit there saying yesto war? You'll be a pauper when you die, soreboy. Dead, while I still live at our addresss.Oh my brother, why do you keep making planswhen I am at seizures of hearts and hands?Come dance the dance, the Papa-Mama dance;bring costumes from the suitcase pasted Ille de France, the S.S. Gripsholm. Papa's London Harness case he took abroad and kept i our attic laced with old leather straps for storage and hisscholar's robes, black licorice - that metamorphosiswith it's crimson blood. "The Papa and Mama Dance

CourageIt is in the small things we see it.The child's first step,as awesome as an earthquake.The first time you rode a bike,wallowing up the sidewalk.The first spanking when your heartwent on a journey all alone.When they called you crybabyor poor or fatty or crazyand made you into an alien,you drank their acidand concealed it.Later,if you faced the death of bombs and bulletsyou did not do it with a banner,you did it with only a hat tocover your heart.You did not fondle the weakness inside youthough it was there.Your courage was a small coalthat you kept swallowing.If your buddy saved youand died himself in so doing,then his courage was not courage,it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

I__ won the worldbut like aforsaken explorer,I__ lostmy map.

And 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.

The rest of my room is book shelves. I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.

I am, to be sure, afraid that if you knew me that you wouldn__ 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__l drift away, pull down the shade of your ivory tower_and after that. Afraid, I guess, that I__l loose you_I keep losing people.

Death's in the good-bye.

It doesn't matter who my father was it matters who I remember he was.

Love your self's self where it lives.