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Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because It Is Impossible For Me To Be God — Or The Universal Woman-and-man — Or Anything Much. I Am What I Feel And Think And Do. I Want To Express My Being As Fully As I Can Because I Somewhere Picked Up The Idea That I Could Justify My Being Alive That Way.

-Sylvia Plath

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Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because

Sylvia Plath

...

Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because It Is Impossible For Me To Be God — Or The Universal Woman-and-man — Or Anything Much. I Am What I Feel And Think And Do. I Want To Express My Being As Fully As I Can Because I Somewhere Picked Up The Idea That I Could Justify My Being Alive That Way.

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This Seemed A Dreary And Wasted Life For A Girl With Fifteen Years Of Straight A's, But I Knew That's What Marriage Was Like, Because Cook And Clean And Wash Was Just What Buddy Willard's Mother Did From Morning Till Night, And She Was The Wife Of A University Professor And Had Been A Private School Teacher Herself.

We Should Meet In Another Life, We Should Meet In Air, Me And You.

I Sank Back In The Gray, Plush Seat And Closed My Eyes. The Air Of The Bell Jar Wadded Round Me And I Couldn't Stir.

Nothing Is Real Except The Present, And Already, I Feel The Weight Of Centuries Smothering Me. Some Girl A Hundred Years Ago Once Lived As I Do. And She Is Dead. I Am The Present, But I Know I, Too, Will Pass. The High Moment, The Burning Flash, Come And Are Gone, Continuous Quicksand. And I Don’t Want To Die.

How Can I Tell Bob That My Happiness Streams From Having Wrenched A Piece Out Of My Life, A Piece Of Hurt And Beauty, And Transformed It To Typewritten Words On Paper? How Can He Know I Am Justifying My Life, My Keen Emotions, My Feeling, By Turning It Into Print?

I Opened The Door And Blinked Out Into The Bright Hall. I Had The Impression It Wasn't Night And It Wasn't Day, But Some Lurid Third Interval That Had Suddenly Slipped Between Them And Would Never End.

I Felt Overstuffed And Dull And Disappointed, The Way I Always Do The Day After Christmas, As If Whatever It Was The Pine Boughs And The Candles And The Silver And Gilt-ribboned Presents And The Birch-log Fires And The Christmas Turkey And The Carols At The Piano Promised Never Came To Pass.

I Have No Preconceptions. Whatever I See, I Swallow Immediately. Just As It Is, Unmisted By Love Or Dislike. I Am Not Cruel, Only Truthful.

Don't Let The Wicked City Get You Down.

I Have Been Holding A Dialogue With Myself And Girding Myself To Stand Fast Without Running.

I Am Made, Crudely, For Success.

The Future Is What Matters — Because One Never Reaches It, But Always Stays In The Present — Like The White Queen Who Had To Run Like The Wind To Remain In The Same Spot.

I Am Terrified By This Dark Thing That Sleeps In Me; All Day I Feel Its Soft, Feathery Turnings, Its Malignity.

Mother Of Otherness, Eat Me.

But When It Came Right Down To It, The Skin Of My Wrist Looked So White And Defensless That I Couldn't Do It. It Was As If What I Wanted To Kill Wasn't In That Skin Or The Thin Blue Pulse That Jumped Under My Thumb, But Somewhere Else, Deeper, More Secret, And A Whole Lot Harder To Get.

I Need Not To Be More With Others, But To Be More & More Deeply, Richly Alone. Recreating Worlds.

I Fancied You'd Return The Way You Said, But I Grow Old And I Forget Your Name. (i Think I Made You Up Inside My Head.)

As A Poet I Would Say Everything Should Be Able To Come Into A Poem But I Can't Put Toothbrushes In A Poem. I Really Can't.

Happy! That Is Indefinable As Far As States Of Being Go.

If Only I Can Find Him... The Man Who Will Be Intelligent, Yet Physically Magnetic And Personable. If I Can Offer That Combination, Why Shouldn't I Expect It In A Man?

But I Am I Now; And So Many Other Millions Are So Irretrievably Their Own Special Variety Of 'i' That I Can Hardly Bear To Think Of It. I: How Firm A Letter; How Reassuring The Three Strokes: One Vertical, Proud And Assertive, And Then The Two Short Horizontal Lines In Quick, Smug Succession. The Pen Scratching On The Paper…i…i…i…i…i…i.

What Did My Arms Do Before They Held You?

See, The Darkness Is Leaking From The Cracks. I Cannot Contain It. I Cannot Contain My Life.

I Am What I Feel And Think And Do.

I Want To Become Acutely Aware Of All I've Taken For Granted.

If I Have A Dry Spell ... I Wait And Live Harder, Eyes, Ears, And Heart Open, And When The Productive Time Comes, It Is That Much Richer.

I Didn't Know Shorthand Either. This Meant I Couldn't Get A Good Job After College. My Mother Kept Telling Me Nobody Wanted A Plain English Major. But An English Major Who Knew Shorthand Would Be Something Else Again. Everybody Would Want Her. She Would Be In Demand Among All The Up-and-coming Young Men And She Would Transcribe Letter After Thrilling Letter. The Trouble Was, I Hated The Idea Of Serving Men In Any Way. I Wanted To Dictate My Own Thrilling Letters.

If There's Anything I Look Down On, It's A Man In A Blue Outfit.

I Lay In That Tub On The Seventeenth Floor Of This Hotel For-women-only, High Up Over The Jazz And Push Of New York, For Near Unto An Hour, And I Felt Myself Growing Pure Again. I Don't Believe In Baptism Or The Waters Of Jordan Or Anything Like That, But I Guess I Feel About A Hot Bath The Way Those Religious People Feel About Holy Water.

I Felt Very Low. I Had Been Unmasked Only That Morning By Jay Cee Herself, And I Felt Now That All The Uncomfortable Suspicions I Had About Myself Were Coming True. After Nineteen Years Of Running After Good Marks And Prizes And Grants Of One Sort And Another, I Was Letting Up, Slowing Down, Dropping Clean Out Of Race.

I Am Inhabited By A Cry. Nightly It Flaps Out Looking, With Its Hooks, For Something To Love.

I Decided I Would Put Off The Novel Until I Had Gone To Europe And Had A Lover, And That I Would Never Learn A Word Of Shorthand. If I Never Learned Shorthand I Would Never Have To Use It.

If Only A Group Of People Were More Important To Me Than The Idea Of A Novel, I Might Begin A Novel.

I Don't Know How Long I Kept At It... I Felt Reasonably Safe, Streched Out On The Floor, And Lay Quite Still. It Didn't Seem To Be Summer Any More

With Me, The Present Is Forever, And Forever Is Always Shifting, Flowing, Melting. This Second Is Life. And When It Is Gone It Is Dead. But You Can't Start Over With Each New Second. You Have To Judge By What Is Dead. It's Like Quicksand... Hopeless From The Start.

When I Was Nineteen, Pureness Was The Great Issue. Instead Of The World Being Divided Up Into Catholics And Protestants Or Republicans And Democrats Or White Men And Black Men Or Even Men And Women, I Saw The World Divided Into People Who Had Slept With Somebody And People Who Hadn’t, And This Seemed The Only Really Significant Difference Between One Person And Another.

Perfection Is Terrible, It Cannot Have Children.

Intoxicated With Madness, I'm In Love With My Sadness

Because Wherever I Sat—on The Deck Of A Ship Or At A Street Café In Paris Or Bangkok—i Would Be Sitting Under The Same Glass Bell Jar, Stewing In My Own Sour Air.

And I Identify Too Closely With My Reading, With My Writing.

Jealousy Can Open The Blood, It Can Make Black Roses.

Why Am I Obsessed With The Idea I Can Justify Myself By Getting Manuscripts Published? Is It An Escape-an Excuse For Any Social Failure-so I Can Say "no, I Don't Go Out For Many Extracurricular Activities, But I Spend A Lot Of Time Writing."

What Is So Real As The Cry Of A Child?

I Don't See,' I Said, 'how People Stand Being Old. Your Insides All Dry Up. When You're Young You're So Self-reliant. You Don't Even Need Much Religion.

I Must Not Be Selfless: Develop A Sense Of Self. A Solidness That Can't Be Attacked.

England Offers New Comforts. I Could Write A Novel There.

What I Fear Most, I Think, Is The Death Of The Imagination.

I Suppose If I Gave Myself The Chance I Could Be An Alcoholic.

I Am Afraid Of Getting Married. Spare Me From Cooking Three Meals A Dayspare Me From The Relentless Cage Of Routine And Rote.

I Had Hoped, At My Departure, I Would Feel Sure And Knowledgeable About Everything That Lay Ahead -- After All, I Had Been "analyzed." Instead, All I Could See Were Question Marks.

You Know What Lies Are For.

I Felt The First Man I Slept With Must Be Intelligent, So I Could Respect Him.

I May Have Made A Straight A In Physics, But I Was Panic-struck. Physics Made Me Sick The Whole Time I Learned It.

Before I Give My Body, I Must Give My Thoughts, My Mind, My Dreams.

It Was Sometime In October; She Had Long Ago Lost Track Of All The Days And It Really Didn’t Matter Because One Was Like Another And There Were No Nights To Separate Them Because She Never Slept Any More.

I Said: I Must Remember This, Being Small.

A Psychiatrist Is The God Of Our Age. But They Cost Money.

I'm About Fifty Years Behind As Far As My Preferences Go And I Must Say That The Poets Who Excite Me Most Are The Americans. There Are Very Few Contemporary English Poets That I Admire.

At This Rate, I'd Be Lucky If I Wrote A Page A Day. Then I Knew What The Problem Was. I Needed Experience. How Could I Write About Life When I'd Never Had A Love Affair Or A Baby Or Even Seen Anybody Die? A Girl I Knew Had Just Won A Prize For A Short Story About Her Adventures Among The Pygmies In Africa. How Could I Compete With That Sort Of Thing?

I Ride Earth's Burning Carousel. Day In, Day Out.

I Am But One More Drop In The Great Sea Of Matter, Defined, With The Ability To Realize My Existence.

And I Am Aware Of My Heart: It Opens And Closes Its Bowl Of Red Blooms Out Of Sheer Love Of Me.

If You Dissect A Bird / To Diagram The Tongue, / You'll Cut The Chord / Articulating Song.

If Neurotic Is Wanting Two Mutually Exclusive Things At One And The Same Time, Then I'm Neurotic As Hell.

The Lyric Abstrusities Of Auden Ring Mystically Down The Circular Canals Of My Ear And It Begins To Look Like Snow. The Good Gray Conservative Obliterating Snow. Smoothing (in One White Lacy Euphemism After Another) Out All The Black Bleak Angular Unangelic Nauseous Ugliness Of The Blasted Sterile World: Dry Buds, Shrunken Stone Houses, Dead Vertical Moving People All All All Go Under The Great White Beguiling Wave. And Come Out Transformed. Lose Yourself In A Numb Dumb Snow-daubed Lattice Of Crystal And Come Out Pure With The White Virginal Veneer You Never Had.

My Best Friends When I Was Young Were Always Doctors. I Used To Dress Up In A White Gauze Helmet And Go Round And See Babies Born And Cadavers Cut Open. This Fascinated Me, But I Could Never Bring Myself To Disciplining Myself To The Point Where I Could Learn All The Details That One Has To Learn To Be A Good Doctor. This Is The Sort Of Opposition: Somebody Who Deals Directly With Human Experiences, Is Able To Cure, To Mend, To Help, This Sort Of Thing.

I, To You, Am Lost In The Gorgeous Errors Of Flesh.

I Felt Wise And Cynical As All Hell.

I Believe That One Should Be Able To Control And Manipulate Experiences, Even The Most Terrific, Like Madness, Being Tortured, This Sort Of Experience, And One Should Be Able To Manipulate These Experiences With An Informed And An Intelligent Mini.

You Cannot Regard Your Own Life With Objective Curiosity All The Time.

There Ought, I Thought, To Be A Ritual For Being Born Twice - Patched, Retreaded And Approved For The Road.

The Frost Makes A Flower, The Dew Makes A Star.

Joy:show Joy & Enjoy: Then Others Will Be Joyful.

You've Only Got So Long To Live.

And So I Rehabilitate Myself - Staying Up Late This Friday Night In Spite Of Vowing To Go To Bed Early, Because It Is More Important To Capture Moments Like This, Keen Shifts In Mood, Sudden Veering Of Direction - Than To Lose It In Slumber.

There Is More Than One Good Way To Drown.

But Life Is Long. And It Is The Long Run That Balances The Short Flare Of Interest And Passion.

The Silence Drew Off, Baring The Pebbles And Shells And All The Tatty Wreckage Of My Life.

I Felt Overstuffed And Dull And Disappointed, The Way I Always Do The Day After Christmas.

In A Rabbit-fear I May Hurl Myself Under The Wheels Of The Car Because The Lights Terrify Me, And Under The Dark Blind Death Of Wheels I Will Be Safe. I Am Very Tired, Very Banal, Very Confused. I Do Not Know Who I Am Tonight. I Wanted To Walk Until I Dropped And Not Complete The Inevitable Circle Of Coming Home.

What Did My Fingers Do Before They Held Him? What Did My Heart Do, With Its Love?

As A Poet, One Lives A Bit On Air. I Always Like Someone Who Can Teach Me Something Practical.

The Moon Has Nothing To Be Sad About, Staring From Her Hood Of Bone. She Is Used To This Sort Of Thing. Her Blacks Crackle And Drag.

You Have Lost All Delight In Life. Ahead Is A Large Array Of Blind Alleys. You Are Half-deliberately, Half-desperately Cutting Off Your Grip On Creative Life. You Are Becoming A Neuter Machine. You Cannot Love, Even If You Knew How To Begin To Love. Every Thought Is A Devil, A Hell-if You Could Do A Lot Of Things Over Again, Ah, How Differently You Would Do Them! You Want To Go Home, Back To The Womb. You Watch The World Bang Door After Door In Your Face, Numbly, Bitterly. You Have Forgotten The Secret You Knew, Once, Ah, Once, Of Being Joyous, Of Laughing, Of Opening Doors.

What Is My Life For And What Am I Going To Do With It? I Don't Know And I'm Afraid. I Can Never Read All The Books I Want; I Can Never Be All The People I Want And Live All The Lives I Want.

Can A Selfish Egocentric Jealous And Unimaginative Female Write A Damn Thing Worthwhile?

I Used To Pray To Recover You.

Please Let Him Come, And Give Me The Resilience & Guts To Make Him Respect Me, Be Interested, And Not To Throw Myself At Him With Loudness Or Hysterical Yelling; Calmly, Gently, Easy Baby Easy. He Is Probably Strutting The Backs Among Crocuses Now With Seven Scandinavian Mistresses. And I Sit, Spiderlike, Waiting, Here, Home; Penelope Weaving Webs Of Webster, Turning Spindles Of Tourneur. Oh, He Is Here; My Black Marauder; Oh Hungry Hungry. I Am So Hungry For A Big Smashing Creative Burgeoning Burdened Love: I Am Here; I Wait; And He Plays On The Banks Of The River Cam Like A Casual Faun.

…beating Time Along The Edge Of Thought.

Is Anyone Anywhere Happy?

I Had Always Imagined Myself Hitching Up On To My Elbows On The Delivery Table After It Was All Over - Dead White, Of Course, With No Makeup And From The Awful Ordeal, But Smiling And Radiant, With My Hair Down To My Waist, And Reaching Out For My First Little Squirmy Child And Saying Its Name, Whatever It Was.

I Think I Am Worthwhile Just Because I Have Optical Nerves And Can Try To Put Down What They Perceive. What A Fool!

Why Can’t I Try On Different Lives, Like Dresses, To See Which Fits Best And Is More Becoming?

I Wanted To Do Everything Once And For All And Be Through With It.

I Wanted Change And Excitement And To Shoot Off In All Directions Myself, Like The Colored Arrows From A Fourth Of July Rocket.

Character Is Fate.

If Every Soldier Refused To Take Arms ... There Would Be No Wars; But No One Has The Courage To Be The First To Live According To Christ And Socrates, Because In A World Of Opportunists They Would Be Martyred.

Why The Hell Are We Conditioned Into The Smooth Strawberry-and-cream Mother-goose-world, Alice-in-wonderland Fable, Only To Be Broken On The Wheel As We Grow Older And Become Aware Of Ourselves As Individuals With A Dull Responsibility In Life?

Let Me Sit In A Flowerpot, The Spiders Won't Notice. My Heart Is A Stopped Geranium.

She Looks Like A Woman Who Has Found It Ridiculous To Commit Herself To A Single Emotional Stance In Anything, But Must Always Ride High Heavy Irony.

Love Is The Bone And Sinew Of My Curse.

But Writing Poems And Letters Doesn't Seem To Do Much Good.

That Is Salvation. To Give Of Love Inside. To Keep Love Of Life, No Matter What, And Give To Others. Generously.

I Do Not Love; I Do Not Love Anybody Except Myself. That Is A Rather Shocking Thing To Admit. I Have None Of The Selfless Love Of My Mother. I Have None Of The Plodding, Practical Love. . . . . I Am, To Be Blunt And Concise, In Love Only With Myself, My Puny Being With Its Small Inadequate Breasts And Meager, Thin Talents. I Am Capable Of Affection For Those Who Reflect My Own World.

I Love The People,' I Said. 'i Have Room In Me For Love, And For Ever So Many Little Lives.

I Am Gone Quite Mad With The Knowledge Of Accepting The Overwhelming Number Of Things I Can Never Know, Places I Can Never Go, And People I Can Never Be.

I Have The One Person I Could Ever Love In This World. Now I Must Work To Be A Person Worthy Of That.

Ever Since I Was Small I Loved Feeling Somebody Comb My Hair. It Made Me Go All Sleepy & Peaceful.

O Heart, Such Disorganization!

Disorganization

Talking About My Fears To Others Feeds It.

...we Shall Board Our Imagined Ship And Wildly Sail Among Sacred Islands Of The Mad Till Death Shatters The Fabulous Stars And Makes Us Real.

Even Amidst Fierce Flames The Golden Lotus Can Be Planted.

Slowly, Slowly, Catch The Monkey.

I Liked Looking On At Other People In Crucial Situations. If There Was A Road Accident Or A Street Fight Or A Baby Pickled In A Laboratory Jar For Me To Look At, I'd Stop And Look So Hard I Never Forgot It.

My Life Is A Discipline, A Prison: I Live For My Own Work, Without Which I Am Nothing.

I Dream Too Much, Work Too Little.

Well, I Know Now. I Know A Little More How Much A Simple Thing Like A Snowfall Can Mean To A Person

What A Man Wants Is A Mate And What A Woman Wants Is Infinite Security,’ And, ‘what A Man Is Is An Arrow Into The Future And A What A Woman Is Is The Place The Arrow Shoots Off From.

The Blood Jet Is Poetry And There Is No Stopping It.

I Hate Technicolor. Everybody In A Technicolor Movie Seems To Feel Obliged To Wear A Lurid Costume In Each New Scene And To Stand Around Like A Clotheshorse With A Lot Of Very Green Trees Or Very Yellow Wheat Or Very Blue Ocean Rolling Away For Miles And Miles In Every Direction.

I Have To Live My Life, And It Is The Only One I’ll Ever Have.

If I Didn't Think, I'd Be Much Happier; If I Didn't Have Any Sex Organs, I Wouldn't Waver On The Brink Of Nervous Emotion And Tears All The Time.

I Wonder About All The Roads Not Taken And Am Moved To Quote Frost...but Won't. It Is Sad To Be Able Only To Mouth Other Poets. I Want Someone To Mouth Me.

The Only Reason I Remembered This Play Was Because It Had A Mad Person In It, And Everything I Had Ever Read About Mad People Stuck In My Mind, While Everything Else Flew Out.

I Have Suffered The Atrocity Of Sunsets.

I Could Never Be A Complete Scholar Or A Complete Housewife Ora Completewriter: Imustcombinea Little Of All, And Thereby Be Imperfect In All.

Pretty Soon, The Only Doubt In My Mind Was The Precise Time And Method Of Committing Suicide. The Only Alternative I Could See Was An Eternity Of Hell For The Rest Of My Life In A Mental Hospital, And I Was Going To Use My Last Ounce Of Free Choice And Choose A Quick Clean Ending.

Perhaps You Considered Yourself An Oracle, Mouthpiece Of The Dead, Or Of Some God Or Other. Thirty Years Now I Have Labored To Dredge The Silt From Your Throat. I Am None The Wiser.

Poetry, I Feel, Is A Tyrannical Discipline, You've Got To Go So Far, So Fast, In Such A Small Space That You've Just Got To Turn Away All The Peripherals.

I Need Some Older, Wiser Being To Cry To. I Talk To God, But The Sky Is Empty, And Orion Walks By And Doesn't Speak.

The Hardest Thing, I Think, Is To Live Richly In The Present, Without Letting It Be Tainted & Spoiled Out Of Fear For The Future Or Regret For A Badly-managed Past.

My Flesh Winced, In Cowardice, From Such A Death.

The Woman Is Perfected. Her Dead Body Wears The Smile Of Accomplishment.

We Know A Thing By Its Opposite Corollary; Hot By Having Experienced Cold; Good By Having Decided What Is Bad; Love By Hate.

So, Now I Shall Talk Every Night. To Myself. To The Moon. I Shall Walk, As I Did Tonight, Jealous Of My Loneliness, In The Blue-silver Of The Cold Moon, Shining Brilliantly On The Drifts Of Fresh-fallen Snow, With The Myriad Sparkles. I Talk To Myself And Look At The Dark Trees, Blessedly Neutral. So Much Easier Than Facing People, Than Having To Look Happy, Invulnerable, Clever.

Ironically, Henry James' Biography Comforts Me & I Long To Make Known To Him His Posthumous Reputation He Wrote, In Pain, Gave All His Life (which Is More Than I Could Think Of Doing I Have Ted, Will Have Children But Few Friends) & The Critics Insulted & Mocked Him, Readers Didn't Read Him.

I Have Taken A Pill To Kill The Thin Papery Feeling.

After All, We Are Nothing More Or Less Than We Choose To Reveal.

The Journey Over The Bridge Had Unnerved Me. The River Water Passed Me By Like An Untouched Drink. I Suspected That Even If My Mother And Brother Had Not Been There I Would Have Made No Move To Jump.

I Was Supposed To Be Having The Time Of My Life.

Time Of My Life

I'm Sarcastic, Skeptical, And Sometimes Callous Because I'm Still Afraid, Deep Down, Of Letting Myself Be Hurt.

Antoine St. Exupery Once Mourned The Loss Of A Man And The Secret Treasures That He Held Inside Him. I Loved Exupery; I Will Read Him Again, And He Will Talk To Me, Not Being Dead, Or Gone. Is That Life After Death — Mind Living On Paper And Flesh Living In Offspring? Maybe. I Do Not Know.

One Night She Hid The Pink Cotton Scarf From Her Raincoat In The Pillowcase When The Nurse Came Around To Lock Up Her Drawers And Closets For The Night. In The Dark She Had Made A Loop And Tried To Pull It Tight Around Her Throat. But Always Just As The Air Stopped Coming And She Felt The Rushing Grow Louder In Her Ears, Her Hands Would Slacken And Let Go, And She Would Lie There Panting For Breath, Cursing The Dumb Instinct In Her Body That Fought To Go On Living

I Didn't Know What I Was Doing In New York.

Not Easy To State The Change You Made. If I'm Alive Now, I Was Dead, Though, Like A Stone, Unbothered By It.

To Look At Her, You Might Not Guess That Inside She Is Laughing And Crying, At Her Own Stupidities And Luckiness, And At The Strange Enigmatic Ways Of The World Which She Will Spend Lifetime Trying To Learn And Understand.

I Love My Rejection Slips. They Show Me I Try.

There Was A Beautiful Time.

The Sheets Grow Heavy As A Lecher's Kiss.

There Is A Certain Unique And Strange Delight About Walking Down An Empty Street Alone.

I Feel Terribly Vulnerable And 'not-myself' When I'm Not Writing.

…'it Always Has To End, Doesn't It? We Always Have To Separate.' 'yes,' I Said. He Was Insistent, 'but It Doesn't Always Have To Be That Way. We Could Be Together Some Day For Always.' 'oh, No,' I Told Him, Wondering If He Knew It Was All Over. 'we Keep Running Till We Die. We Separate, Get Further Apart, Till We Are Dead.

I Can Never Read All The Books I Want; I Can Never Be All The People I Want And Live All The Lives I Want. I Can Never Train Myself In All The Skills I Want. And Why Do I Want? I Want To Live And Feel All The Shades, Tones And Variations Of Mental And Physical Experience Possible In Life. And I Am Horribly Limited.

Famous Inspirational

I Deserve That, Don't I, Some Sort Of Blazing Love That I Can Live With.

The Sky Leans On Me, Me, The One Upright Among All Horizontals.

I Collect Men With Interesting Names.

I’ll Never Speak To God Again.

The Moon, Too, Abases Her Subjects, But In The Daytime She Is Ridiculous. Your Dissatisfactions, On The Other Hand, Arrive Through The Mailslot With Loving Regularity, White And Blank, Expansive As Carbon Monoxide. No Day Is Safe From News Of You, Walking About In Africa Maybe, But Thinking Of Me.

Why Honey, Don't You Want To Get Dressed?" My Mother Took Care Never To Tell Me To Do Anything. She Would Only Reason With Me Sweetly, Like One Intelligent, Mature Person With Another. It's Almost Three In The Afternoon." I'm Writing A Novel," I Said. "i Haven't Got Time To Change Into This And Change Into That.

Very Depressed Today. Unable To Write A Thing. Menacing Gods. I Feel Outcast On A Cold Star, Unable To Feel Anything But An Awful Helpless Numbness.

So You Got Rid Of Your Astonishment That Someone Could Write So Much More Dynamically Than You. You Stopped Cherishing Your Aloneness And Poetic Differentness To Your Delicately Flat Little Bosom. You Said: She's To Good To Forget. How About Making Her A Friend And Competitor — You Could Learn Alot From Her. So You'll Try. So Maybe She'll Laugh In Your Face. So Maybe She'll Beat You Hollow In The End. So Anyhow, You'll Try, And Maybe, Possibly, She Can Stand You. Here's Hoping!

There Is Something Demoralizing About Watching Two People Get More And More Crazy About Each Other, Especially When You Are The Only Extra Person In The Room. It's Like Watching Paris From An Express Caboose Heading In The Opposite Direction--every Second The City Gets Smaller And Smaller, Only You Feel It's Really You Getting Smaller And Smaller And Lonelier And Lonelier, Rushing Away From All Those Lights And Excitement At About A Million Miles An Hour.

There I Went Again, Building Up A Glamorous Picture Of A Man Who Would Love Me Passionately The Minute He Met Me, And All Out Of A Few Prosy Nothings.

There Is A Charge For The Eyeing Of My Scars, There Is A Charge For The Hearing Of My Heart - It Really Goes. And There Is A Charge, A Very Large Charge, For A Word Or A Touch Or A Bit Of Blood Or A Piece Of My Hair Or My Clothes.

Only I Wasn't Steering Anything, Not Even Myself.

I, Love, I Am The Pure Acetylene Virgin Attended By Roses.

But Everybody Has Exactly The Same Smiling Frightened Face, With The Look That Says: "i'm Important. If You Only Get To Know Me, You Will See How Important I Am. Look Into My Eyes. Kiss Me, And You Will See How Important I Am.

You Are The One. Solid The Spaces Lean On, Envious. You Are The Baby In The Barn.

On The Train: Staring Hypnotized At The Blackness Outside The Window, Feeling The Incomparable Rhythmic Language Of The Wheels, Clacking Out Nursery Rhymes, Summing Up Moments Of The Mind Like The Chant Of A Broken Record: God Is Dead, God Is Dead. Going, Going, Going. And The Pure Bliss Of This, The Erotic Rocking Of The Coach. France Splits Open Like A Ripe Fig In The Mind; We Are Raping The Land, We Are Not Stopping.

I Am Dead To Them, Even Though I Once Flowered.

The First Time I Saw A Fingerbowl Was At The Home Of My Benefactress. [...] The Water Had A Few Cherry Blossoms In It, And I Thought It Must Be Some Clear Sort Of Japanese After-dinner Soup And Ate Every Bit Of It, Including The Crisp Little Blossoms.

The Night Sky Is Only A Sort Of Carbon Paper, Blueblack, With The Much-poked Periods Of Stars Letting In The Light, Peephole After Peephole--- A Bonewhite Light, Like Death, Behind All Things.

A Living Doll, Everywhere You Look. It Can Sew, It Can Cook, It Can Talk, Talk, Talk. . . . My Boy, It's Your Last Resort. Will You Marry It, Marry It, Marry It.

What I Cannot Forgive Is Dishonesty - And No Matter What, Or How Hard, I Would Rather Know The Truth Of Which I Today Had Such A Clear & Devastating Vision From His Mouth Than Hear Foul Evasions, Blurrings And Rattiness.

Doing All The Little Tricky Things It Takes To Grow Up, Step By Step, Into An Anxious And Unsettling World.

But When It Came Right Down To It, The Skin Of My Wrist Looked So White And Defenseless That I Couldn't Do It.

I Think That In Poetry Personal Experience Is Very Important, But Certainly It Shouldn't Be A Kind Of Shut-box And Mirror Looking, Narcissistic Experience. I Believe It Should Be Relevant, And Relevant To The Larger Things, The Bigger Things Such As Hiroshima And Dachau And So On.

I Have The Choice Of Being Constantly Active And Happy Or Introspectively Passive And Sad. Or I Can Go Mad By Ricocheting In Between.

I Have Never Found Anybody Who Could Stand To Accept The Daily Demonstrative Love I Feel In Me, And Give Back As Good As I Give.

You Walked In, Laughing, Tears Welling Confused, Mingling In Your Throat. How Can You Be So Many Women To So Many People, Oh You Strange Girl?

Tomorrow Is Another Day Toward Death.

Tomorrow Is Another Day

God, How I Ricochet Between Certainties And Doubts.

There Is So Much Hurt In This Game Of Searching For A Mate, Of Testing, Trying. And You Realize Suddenly That You Forgot It Was A Game, And Turn Away In Tears.

God, But Life Is Loneliness, Despite All The Opiates, Despite The Shrill Tinsel Gaiety Of "parties" With No Purpose, Despite The False Grinning Faces We All Wear. And When At Last You Find Someone To Whom You Feel You Can Pour Out Your Soul, You Stop In Shock At The Words You Utter - They Are So Rusty, So Ugly, So Meaningless And Feeble From Being Kept In The Small Cramped Dark Inside You So Long. Yes, There Is Joy, Fulfillment And Companionship - But The Loneliness Of The Soul In Its Appalling Self-consciousness Is Horrible And Overpowering.

The Body Is Amazingly Stubborn When It Comes To Sacrificing Itself To The Annihilating Directions Of The Mind.

The Only Thing I Could Think Of Was Turkey Neck And Turkey Gizzards And I Felt Very Depressed.

I Saw The Years Of My Life Spaced Along A Road In The Form Of Telephone Poles Threaded Together By Wires. I Counted One, Two, Three... Nineteen Telephone Poles, And Then The Wires Dangled Into Space, And Try As I Would, I Couldn't See A Single Pole Beyond The Nineteenth.

And I, Love, Am A Pathological Liar.

Pathological Liar

Apparently, The Most Difficult Feat For A Cambridge Male Is To Accept A Woman Not Merely As Feeling, Not Merely As Thinking, But As Managing A Complex, Vital Interweaving Of Both.

What Horrifies Me Most Is The Idea Of Being Useless: Well-educated, Brilliantly Promising, And Fading Out Into An Indifferent Middle Age.

I Wanted To Crawl In Between Those Black Lines Of Print, The Way You Crawl Through A Fence, And Go To Sleep Under That Beautiful Big Green Fig-tree.

Maybe Forgetfulness, Like A Kind Snow, Should Numb And Cover Them. But They Were A Part Of Me. They Were My Landscape.

I Write Only Because There Is A Voice Within Me That Will Not Be Still

So I Kiss Him, And There Is The Great Dark Sea Ahead.

I Must Be Lean & Write & Make Worlds Beside This To Live In.

So I Began To Think Maybe It Was True That When You Were Married And Had Children It Was Like Being Brainwashed, And Afterward You Went About As Numb As A Slave In A Totalitarian State.

I Have Stitched Life Into Me Like A Rare Organ

I Am I-i Am Powerful, But To What Extent? I Am I.

I Think The Coming Of Spring, The Stars Overhead, The First Snowfall And So On Are Gifts For A Child, A Young Poet.

Life Was Not To Be Sitting In Hot Amorphic Leisure In My Backyard Idly Writing Or Not Writing, As The Spirit Moved Me. It Was, Instead, Running Madly, In A Crowded Schedule, In A Squirrel Cage Of Busy People. Working, Living, Dancing, Dreaming, Talking, Kissing- Singing, Laughing, Learning.

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Allyson Schwartz

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