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Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.

Anne Sexton

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Anne Sexton
Age: 45 †
Born: 1928
Born: November 9
Died: 1974
Died: October 4
Poet
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Anne Gray Harvey
Poem
Opposite
Suicide
Opposites

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Letters are false really - they are expressions of the way you wish you were instead of the way you are.
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My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
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For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.
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I would sell my life to avoid the pain that begins in the crib with its bars or perhaps with your first breath when the planets drill your future into you.
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I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.
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I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.
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My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more.
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Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.
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Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.
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Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
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One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
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The ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.
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As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.
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I'll Vacuum up my stale hair, I'll pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll write a poem called Yellow and put my lips down to drink it up.
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The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.
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... and my love stays bitterly glowing, spasms of it will not sleep, and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade but there is no one to cover me- not even God.
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My mouth blooms like a cut.
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Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.
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As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.
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No matter whose bed you die in the bed will be yours for your voyage onto the surgical andiron of God.
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