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I'll Vacuum up my stale hair, I'll pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll write a poem called Yellow and put my lips down to drink it up.

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
Called
Neighbor
Hope
Debt
Debts
Write
Lips
Vacuums
Writing
Motivation
Vacuum
Pay
Stale
Drink
Neighbors
Hair
Yellow
Joy
Poem

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The family story tells, and it was told true, of my great-grandfather who begat eight genius children and bought twelve almost new grand pianos. He left a considerable estate when he died.
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Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.
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Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.
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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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If the doctors cure then the sun sees it. If the doctors kill then the earth hides it. The doctors should fear arrogance more than cardiac arrest.
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You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going
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When someone kisses someone or flushes the toilet it is my other who sits in a ball and cries. My other beats a tin drum in my heart. My other hangs up laundry as I try to sleep. My other cries and cries and cries when I put on a cocktail dress.
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Fee-fi-fo-fum - Now I'm borrowed. Now I'm numb.
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Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.
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Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.
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There is an animal inside me, clutching fast to my heart, a huge crab.
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Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours.
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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 mouth blooms like a cut.
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Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.
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Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...
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Someone is dead. Even the trees know it, those poor old dancers who come on lewdly, all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.
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Some women marry houses. It's another kind of skin it has a heart, a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.
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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 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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