Anne Sexton

Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.

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?

I’ll put it out there: I am scarred by the nostalgic indicipherability of my own desires; I an engulfed by the intimidating unknown, pushed through darkness and dragged down by the irretrievable past sweetness of my memories.

I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.

You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going

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.

I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving; _x000D_ then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything.

Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.

It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.

Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth.

For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.

As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.

Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.

My heart is on a budget._x000D_ It keeps me on the brink.

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.

And tonight our skin, our bones, that have survived our fathers, will meet, delicate in the hold, fastened together in an intricate lock. Then one of us will shout, "My need is more desperate!" and I will eat you slowly with kisses even though the killer in you has gotten out.

I like you; your eyes are full of language." [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]

I am a collection of dismantled almosts.

Thief!- how did you crawl into, crawl down alone into the death I wanted so badly and for so long.

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.