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

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The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.
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Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.
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Loving me with my shoes off means loving my long brown legs, sweet dears, as good as spoons and my feet, those two children let out to play naked.
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[I] have fantasies of killing myself and thus being the powerful one not the powerless one.
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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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Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
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Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents, mountains rise up and down like ghosts yet all is natural, all is change.
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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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My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more.
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Oh, darling, let your body in, let it tie you in, in comfort.
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For forty days, for forty nights Jesus put one foot in front of the other and the man he carried, if it was a man, became heavier and heavier.
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I tied down time with a rope but it came back. Then I put my head in a death bowl and my eyes shut up like clams. They didn't come back.
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When they turn the sun on again I'll plant children under it, I'll light up my soul with a match and let it sing.
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You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.
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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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stop the darkness and its amputations and find the real McCoy in the private holiness of my hands.
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Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.
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To tell the truth days are all the same size and words aren't much company.
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Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.
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Fee-fi-fo-fum - Now I'm borrowed. Now I'm numb.
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