Quote

Take adultery or theft. Merely sins. It is evil who dines on the soul, stretching out its long bone tongue. It is evil who tweezers my heart, picking out its atomic worms.

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
Soul
Picking
Take
Worms
Dines
Heart
Sins
Dine
Long
Bones
Atomic
Tongue
Adultery
Merely
Theft
Sin
Stretching
Evil
Bone

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Earth, earthriding your merry-go-roundtoward extinction,right to the rootsthickening the oceans like gravy,festering in your caves,you are becoming a latrine.
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I have forgiven all the old actors for dying. A new one comes on with the same lines, like large white growths, in his mouth. The dancers come on from the wings, perfectly mated.
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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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Frog has no nerves. Frog is as old as a cockroach. Frog is my father's genitals. Frog is a malformed doorknob. Frog is a soft bag of green.
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I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.
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sorrow is easier than guilt.
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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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To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.
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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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Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
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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 did not know the woman I would be nor that blood would bloom in me each month like an exotic flower, nor that children, two monuments, would break from between my legs.
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My safe, safe psychosis is broken. It was hard. It was made of stone. It covered my face like a mask. But it has cracked.
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We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
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I try to take care and be gentle to them. Words and eggs must be handled with care. Once broken they are impossible things to repair.
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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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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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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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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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I see myself as one would see another. I have been cut in two.
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