Anne Sexton

The Witch's Life" When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her.

Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.

Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.

Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.

I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...

We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!

And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself

Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.

Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.

The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives

She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid.

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.

Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.

My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right.

You lay, a small knuckle on my white bed; lay, that fist like a snail, small and strong at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed with love. At first, hunger is not wrong.

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.

Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.

The man inside of woman ties a knot so that they will never again be separate.

I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.