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There is an animal inside me, clutching fast to my heart, a huge crab.

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
Crabs
Fast
Inside
Huge
Animal
Heart
Clutching
Crab

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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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I leave you, home, when I'm ripped from the doorstep by commerce or fate. Then I submit to the awful subway of the world.
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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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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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Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.
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Women tell time by the body. They are like clocks. They are always fastened to the earth, listening for its small animal noises.
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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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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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Fee-fi-fo-fum - Now I'm borrowed. Now I'm numb.
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It's all a matter of history. Brandy is no solace. Librium only lies me down like a dead snow queen. Yes! I am still the criminal.
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As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.
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God owns heaven but He craves the earth.
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Of course the New Testament is very small. Its mouth opens four times as out-of-date as a prehistoric monster, yet somehow man-made.
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But even in a telephone booth evil can seep out of the receiver and we must cover it with a mattress, and then tear it from its roots and bury it, bury it.
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Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind
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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 silence is death. It comes each day with its shock to sit on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes and the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.
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In an old time there was a king as wise as a dictionary.
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No one to hate except the slim fish of memory that slides in and out of my brain.
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When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.
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