Quote

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.

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
Enemy
Crafts
Asks
Twice
Carpenters
Taken
Suicide
Suicides
Language
Tools
Carpenter
Never
Build
Declared
Like
Magic
Eaten
Simply
Craft
Special
Possessed

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In a dream you are never eighty.
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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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Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes, drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed. You'll move off.
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I can only sign over everything, the house, the dog, the ladders, the jewels, the soul, the family tree, the mailbox. Then I can sleep. Maybe.
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Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.
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I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
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And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
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I want to kiss God on His nose and watch Him sneeze and so do you. Not out of disrespect. Out of pique. Out of a man-to-man thing.
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Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.
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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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[I] have fantasies of killing myself and thus being the powerful one not the powerless one.
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Poetry to me is prayer.
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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?
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The man inside of woman ties a knot so that they will never again be separate.
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I burn the way money burns.
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Once upon a time we were all born, popped out like jelly rolls forgetting our fishdom, the pleasuring seas, the country of comfort, spanked into the oxygens of death.
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I am younger each year at the first snow.
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Rejoice with the day lily for it is born for a day to live by the mailbox and glorify the roadside
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Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.
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