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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.

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
Life
Hang
Gift
Sun
Mass
Excitable
Black
Repeating
Dream
Hospital
Around
Shift
Live
Hospitals

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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 sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.
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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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You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going
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The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.
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I am torn in two but I will conquer myself.
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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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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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Now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd say, I am rowing, I am rowing.
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If you meet a cross-eyed person you must plunge into the grass, alongside the chilly ants, fish through the green fingernails and come up with the four-leaf clover.
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I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything.
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it was my first doll that water went into and water came out of much earlier it was the diaper I wore and the dirt thereof and my mother hating me for it
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One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is Whatever you do, don't be boring.
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My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all's certain and good, that the marriage won't end.
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I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.
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Depression is boring, I think and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave.
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