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

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The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.
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Somebody who should have been born is gone. Yes, woman, such logic will lead to loss without death. Or say what you meant, you coward . . . this baby that I bleed.
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Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through. Birds turn into plumber's tools, a sonnet turns into a dirty joke, a wind turns into a tracheotomy, a boat turns into a corpse.
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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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Please God, we're all right here. Please leave us alone. Don't send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone.
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Home is my Bethlehem, my succoring shelter, my mental hospital, my wife, my dam, my husband, my sir, my womb, my skull.
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With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
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I was only sitting here in my white study with the awful black words pushing me around.
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God owns heaven but He craves the earth.
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There is hope. There is hope everywhere. Today God give milk and I have the pail.
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The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.
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Fear / a motor, / pumps me around and around / until I fade slowly.
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Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said?
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I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.
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So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.
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The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die.
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This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.
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Thumbs grow into my throat. I wear slaps like a spot of rouge.
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I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.
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I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.
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