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One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.

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
Picket
Littles
Fences
Little
Nightmares
Fence
Nightmare
Build
White
Keep

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The sanest thing in this world is love.
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The place I live in is a kind of maze and I keep seeking the exit or the home.
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Fear / a motor, / pumps me around and around / until I fade slowly.
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It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious
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Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.
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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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To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.
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Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.
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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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I who was a house full of bowel movement, I who was a defaced altar, I who wanted to crawl toward God could not move nor eat bread.
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Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out.
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Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.
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There is no word for time. Today we will not think to number another summer or watch its white bird into the ground.
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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.
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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 lay there silently, hoarding my small dignity. I did not ask about the gate or the closet. I did not question the bedtime ritual where, on the cold bathroom tiles, I was spread out daily and examined for flaws. I did not know that my bones, those solids, those pieces of sculpture would not splinter.
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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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I imitatea memory of beliefthat I do not own.
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I would like to bury all the hating eyes under the sand somewhere.
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bike downtown, stick out tongues at the Catholics. Or form a Piss Club where we all go in the bushes and peek at each other's sex.
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