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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.

-Sylvia Plath

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The Lyric Abstrusities Of

Sylvia Plath

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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.

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There Was A Beautiful Time.

I Feel That Very Strongly: Having Been An Academic, Having Been Tempted By The Invitation To Stay On To Become A Ph.d., A Professor, And All That, One Side Of Me Certainly Does Respect All Disciplines, As Long As They Don't Ossify.

The Reason I Haven't Been Writing In This Book For So Long Is Partly That I Haven't Had One Decent Coherent Thought To Put Down.

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 Wanted To Tell Her That If Only Something Were Wrong With My Body It Would Be Fine, I Would Rather Have Anything Wrong With My Body Than Something Wrong With My Head, But The Idea Seemed So Involved And Wearisome That I Didn’t Say Anything. I Only Burrowed Down Further In The Bed.

God Has To Remind Us This Isn't Heaven By A Long Shot, So He Increases The Radios And Lethal Flies.

Miracles Occur, If You Dare To Call Those Spasmodic Tricks Of Radiance Miracles. The Wait's Begun Again, The Long Wait For The Angel, For That Rare, Random Descent.

The Abstract Kills, The Concrete Saves.

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

I Lean To You, Numb As A Fossil. Tell Me I'm Here.

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

I Have Suffered The Atrocity Of Sunsets.

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

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

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

A Skeptic, I Would Ask For Consistency First Of All.

I Hurl My Heart To Halt His Pace.

It Is So Much Safer Not To Feel, Not To Let The World Touch Me.

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

They Had To Call And Call And Pick The Worms Off Me Like Sticky Pearls.

I Had Removed My Patent Leather Shoes After A While, For They Foundered Badly In The Sand. It Pleased Me To Think They Would Be Perched There On The Silver Log, Pointing Out To Sea, Like A Sort Of Soul-compass, After I Was Dead.

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."

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

Love Is The Bone And Sinew Of My Curse.

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.

Mother Of Otherness, Eat Me.

Whenever I'm Sad I'm Going To Die, Or So Nervous I Can't Sleep, Or In Love With Somebody I Won't Be Seeing For A Week, I Slump Down Just So Far And Then I Say: 'i'll Go Take A Hot Bath.

I Started Adding Up All The Things I Couldn't Do.

Yes, I Was Infatuated With You: I Am Still. No One Has Ever Heightened Such A Keen Capacity Of Physical Sensation In Me. I Cut You Out Because I Couldn't Stand Being A Passing Fancy. Before I Give My Body, I Must Give My Thoughts, My Mind, My Dreams. And You Weren't Having Any Of Those.

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

Sometimes I Nursed Starfish Alive In Jam Jars Of Seawater And Watched Them Grow Back Lost Arms. On This Day, This Awful Birthday Of Otherness, My Rival, Somebody Else, I Flung The Starfish Against A Stone. Let It Perish.

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

I Couldn’t See The Point Of Getting Up. I Had Nothing To Look Forward To.

Last Year A Friend Went Dark In A Nervous City Alone, The Sea Flashing Against His Glasses, The Sea Sorted Out At Last In His Inner Ear So He Could Leave This World As He'd Entered It Through The Undependable Irrational Influence Of Water. -kevin Jeffery Clark 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 At.

I May Never Be Happy, But Tonight I Am Content. At Times Like This I'd Call Myself A Fool To Ask For More.

I Think That As Far As Language Goes I'm An American, I'm Afraid, My Accent Is American, My Way Of Talk Is An American Way Of Talk, I'm An Old-fashioned American. That's Probably One Of The Reasons Why I'm In England Now And Why I'll Always Stay In England.

When You Are Insane, You Are Busy Being Insane-all The Time ... When I Was Crazy, That Was All I Was.

I Thought How Strange It Had Never Occurred To Me Before That I Was Only Purely Happy Until I Was Nine Years Old.

* To Know A Lot Of People I Love Pieces Of, And To Want To Synthesize Those Pieces In Me Somehow, Be It By Painting Or Writing. * To Know That Millions Of Others Are Unhappy And That Life Is A Gentleman's Agreement To Grin And Paint Your Face Gay So Others Will Feel They Are Silly To Be Unhappy, And Try To Catch The Contagion Of Joy, While Inside So Many Are Dying Of Bitterness And Unfulfillment.

Now I Am Silent, Hate Up To My Neck, Thick, Thick. I Do Not Speak.

I Felt Very Still And Empty, The Way The Eye Of A Tornado Must Feel, Moving Dully Along In The Middle Of The Surrounding Hullabaloo.

Don't Talk To Me About The World Needing Cheerful Stuff! What The Person Out Of Belsen Physical Or Psychological Wants Is Nobody Saying The Birdies Still Go Tweet-tweet, But The Full Knowledge That Somebody Else Has Been There And Knows The Worst, Just What It Is Like.

Remember, Remember, This Is Now, And Now, And Now. Live It, Feel It, Cling To It. I Want To Become Acutely Aware Of All I’ve Taken For Granted.

So Much Working, Reading, Thinking, Living To Do! A Lifetime Is Not Long Enough.

I Am Afraid Of Getting Older … I Am Afraid Of Getting Married. Spare Me From Cooking Three Meals A Day—spare Me From The Relentless Cage Of Routine And Rote. I Want To Be Free…. I Want, I Want To Think, To Be Omniscient…. I Think I Would Like To Call Myself ‘the Girl Who Wanted To Be God.

I Never Feel So Much Myself As When I'm In A Hot Bath.

Nothing Stinks Like A Pile Of Unpublished Writing, Which Remark I Guess Shows I Still Don't Have A Pure Motive (o It's-such-fun-i-just-can't-stop-who-cares-if-it's-published-or-read) About Writing.

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

Life Has Been Some Combination Of Fairy-tale Coincidence And Joie De Vivre And Shocks Of Beauty Together With Some Hurtful Self-questioning.

Self Questioning

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

I Knew You'd Decide To Be All Right Again.

The Tulips Are Too Red...they Hurt Me.

I Am Terrified By This Dark Thing That Sleeps In Me.

Let's Face It: I'm Scared, Scared And Frozen. First, I Guess, I'm Afraid For Myself ... The Old Primitive Urge For Survival. It's Getting So I Live Every Moment With Terrible Intensity. Last Night, Driving Back From Boston, I Lay Back In The Car And Let The Colored Lights Come At Me, The Music From The Radio, The Reflection Of The Guy Driving. It All Flowed Over Me With A Screaming Ache Of Pain ... Remember, Remember, This Is Now, And Now, And Now. Live It, Feel It, Cling To It. I Want To Become Acutely Aware Of All I've Taken For Granted. When You Feel That This May Be The Good-bye, The Last Time, It Hits You Harder.

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.

I Thought The Most Beautiful Thing In The World Must Be Shadow, The Million Moving Shapes And Cul-de-sacs Of Shadow. There Was Shadow In Bureau Drawers And Closets And Suitcases, And Shadow Under Houses And Trees And Stones, And Shadow At The Back Of People's Eyes And Smiles, And Shadow, Miles And Miles And Miles Of It, On The Night Side Of The Earth.

If Doctor Nolan Asked Me For The Matches, I Would Say That I'd Thought They Were Made Of Candy And Had Eaten Them.

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

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.

How Many Different Deaths I Can Die?

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.

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.

If The Moon Smiled, She Would Resemble You. You Leave The Same Impression Of Something Beautiful, But Annihilating.

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

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

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.

…i Hate Myself For Not Being Able To Go Downstairs Naturally And Seek Comfort In Numbers. I Hate Myself For Having To Sit Here And Be Torn Between I Know Not What Within Me.

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.

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

Every Woman Adores A Fascist, The Boot In The Face, The Brute Brute Heart Of A Brute Like You.

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

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.

I Wish To Cry. Yet, I Laugh, And My Lipstick Leaves A Red Stain Like A Bloody Crescent Moon On Top Of The Beer Can

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.

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

The Blood Of Love Welled Up In My Heart With A Slow Pain.

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

To The Person In The Bell Jar, Blank And Stopped As A Dead Baby, The World Itself Is A Bad Dream.

I Am Still Raw. I Say I May Be Back. You Know What Lies Are For. Even In Your Zen Heaven We Shan't Meet.

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

…* To Learn That Money Makes Life Smooth In Some Ways, And To Feel How Tight And Threadbare Life Is If You Have Too Little. * To Despise Money, Which Is A Farce, Mere Paper, And To Hate What You Have To Do For It, And Yet To Long To Have It In Order To Be Free From Slaving For It. * To Yearn Toward Art, Music, Ballet And Good Books, And Get Them Only In Tantalizing Snatches.

So Many People Are Shut Up Tight Inside Themselves Like Boxes, Yet They Would Open Up, Unfolding Quite Wonderfully, If Only You Were Interested In Them.

The Trouble About Jumping Was That If You Didn't Pick The Right Number Of Stories, You Might Still Be Alive When You Hit Bottom.

Read Widely Of Others' Experiences, Even If It'd Be More Comfortable To Snuggle Back In The Comforting Cotton-wool Of Blissful Ignorance.

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.

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.

If I Rest, If I Think Inward, I Go Mad.

God, How I Ricochet Between Certainties And Doubts.

Is Anyone Anywhere Happy?

I Want To Write Because I Have The Urge To Excel In One Medium Of Translation And Expression Of Life. I Can't Be Satisfied With The Colossal Job Of Merely Living. Oh, No, I Must Order Life In Sonnets And Sestinas And Provide A Verbal Reflector For My 60-watt Lighted Head.

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.

We Stayed At Home To Write, To Consolidate Our Outstretched Selves.

I Love People. Everybody. I Love Them, I Think, As A Stamp Collector Loves His Collection. Every Story, Every Incident, Every Bit Of Conversation Is Raw Material For Me.

Love, Love, I Have Hung Our Cave With Roses.

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.

Worse Even Than Your Maddening Song, Your Silence.

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

If I Didn’t Think, I’d Be Much Happier.

With That Strange Knowing That Comes Over Me, Like A Clairvoyance, I Know That I Am Sure Of Myself And My Enormous And Alarmingly Timeless Love For You; Which Will Always Be.

I Am So Hungry For A Big Smashing Creative Burgeoning Burdened Love.

She Stared At Her Reflection In The Glossed Shop Windows As If To Make Sure, Moment By Moment, That She Continued To Exist.

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've Got To Have Something. I Want To Stop It All, The Whole Monumental Grotesque Joke, Before It's Too Late. But Writing Poems And Letters Doesn't Seem To Do Much Good.

And I A Smiling Woman. I Am Only Thirty. And Like The Cat I Have Nine Times To Die.

Let Me Live, Love And Say It Well In Good Sentences.

At Twenty I Tried To Die And Get Back, Back, Back To You. I Thought Even The Bones Would Do.

Perfection Is Terrible, It Cannot Have Children.

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.

It Was My Last Act Of Love (first Words To Her Mother In The Hospital After Her First Major Suicide Attempt)

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

I Want To Live And Feel All The Shades, Tones And Variations Of Mental And Physical Experience Possible In Life.

Character Is Fate.

I Began To See Why Woman-haters Could Make Such Fools Of Women. Woman-haters Were Like Gods: Invulnerable And Chock Full Of Power. They Descended, And Then They Disappeared. You Could Never Catch One.

If You Expect Nothing From Anybody, You’re Never Disappointed.

I Think The Whole Emphasis In England, In Universities, On Practical Criticism (but Not That So Much As On Historical Criticism, Knowing What Period A Line Comes From) This Is Almost Paralysing. In America, In University, We Read - What? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, That Is Where We Began. Shakespeare Flaunted In The Background. I'm Not Sure I Agree With This, But I Think That' For The Young Poet, The Writing Poet, It Is Not Quite So Frightening To Go To University In America As It Is In England, For These Reasons.

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

A Ring Of Gold With The Sun In It? Lies. Lies And A Grief.

I Am Jealous Of Those Who Think More Deeply, Who Write Better, Who Draw Better, Who Ski Better, Who Look Better, Who Live Better, Who Love Better Than I.

Stars Open Among The Lilies. Are You Not Blinded By Such Expressionless Sirens? This Is The Silence Of Astounded Souls.

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 Didn’t Want My Picture Taken Because I Was Going To Cry. I Didn’t Know Why I Was Going To Cry, But I Knew That If Anybody Spoke To Me Or Looked At Me Too Closely The Tears Would Fly Out Of My Eyes And The Sobs Would Fly Out Of My Throat And I’d Cry For A Week. I Could Feel The Tears Brimming And Sloshing In Me Like Water In A Glass That Is Unsteady And Too Full.

Tonight I Am Ugly. I Have Lost All Faith In My Ability To Attract Males, And In The Female Animal That Is A Rather Pathetic Malady . . . I Don't Care About Anyone, And The Feeling Is Quite Obviously Mutual. What Is It That Makes One Attract Others?

I Suppose I'll Always Be Over-vulnerable, Slightly Paranoid.

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.

I Am Learning Peacefulness, Lying By Myself Quietly, As The Light Lies On These White Walls, This Bed, These Hands. I Am Nobody; I Have Nothing To Do With Explosions.

And, I Think: I Am But One More Drop In The Great Sea Of Matter, Defined, With The Ability To Realize My Existence. Of The Millions, I, Too, Was Potentially Everything At Birth. I, Too, Was Stunted, Narrowed, Warped, By My Environment, My Outcroppings Of Heredity. I, Too, Will Find A Set Of Beliefs, Of Standards To Live By, Yet The Very Satisfaction Of Finding Them Will Be Marred By The Fact That I Have Reached The Ultimate In Shallow, Two-dimensional Living — A Set Of Values.

As From A Star I Saw, Coldly And Soberly, The Separateness Of Everything. I Felt The Wall Of My Skin; I Am I. That Stone Is A Stone. My Beautiful Fusion With The Things Of This World Was Over.

The Trouble Was, I Had Been Inadequate All Along, I Simply Hadn't Thought About It.

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

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.

I Can't Be Satisfied With The Colossal Job Of Merely Living.

But They Know. They All Know. And What Am I Against So Many…?

But I Wasn't Sure. I Wasn't Sure At All. How Did I Know That Someday―at College, In Europe, Somewhere, Anywhere―the Bell Jar, With Its Stifling Distortions, Wouldn't Descend Again?

I Wondered Why I Couldn't Go The Whole Way Doing What I Should Any More. This Made Me Sad And Tired. Then I Wondered Why I Couldn't Go The Whole Way Doing What I Shouldn't, The Way Doreen Did, And This Made Me Even Sadder And More Tired.

Masks Are The Order Of The Day - And The Least I Can Do Is Cultivate The Illusion That I Am Gay, Serene, Not Hollow And Afraid.

Talking About My Fears To Others Feeds It.

I Am Silver And Exact.i Have No Preconceptions.

I Think I May Well Be A Jew.

Once One Has Seen God, What Is The Remedy?

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

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.

A Black-sharded Lady Keeps Me In A Parrot Cage.

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.

And I, Love, Am A Pathological Liar.

Pathological Liar

I Shall Never Get Out Of This! There Are Two Of Me Now: This New Absolutely White Person And The Old Yellow One, And The White Person Is Certainly The Superior One. She Doesn't Need Food, She Is One Of The Real Saints. At The Beginning I Hated Her, She Had No Personality- She Lay In Bed With Me Like A Dead Body And I Was Scared, Because She Was Shaped Just The Way I Was Only Much Whiter And Unbreakable And With No Complaints. I Couldn't Sleep For A Week She Was So Cold.

I Had Imagined A Kind, Ugly, Intuitive Man Looking Up And Say, 'ah!' In An Encouraging Way, As If He Could See Something I Couldn't, And Then I Would Find Words To Tell Him How I Was So Scared, As If I Were Being Stuffed Farther And Farther Into A Black, Airless Sack With No Way Out.

Death May Whiten In Sun Or Out Of It.

Sometimes I Feel Like I'm Not Solid. I'm Hollow. There's Nothing Behind My Eyes. I'm A Negative Of A Person. All I Want Is Blackness, Blackness And Silence.

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

The Lawn Was White With Doctors

I Collect Men With Interesting Names.

I Think If I Had Done Anything Else I Would Like To Have Been A Doctor. This Is The Sort Of Polar Opposition To Being A Writer, I Suppose.

In Spite Of Everything, I Still Have My Good Old Sense Of Humor.

Compared With Me, A Tree Is Immortal.

I Shut My Eyes And All The World Drops Dead; I Lift My Eyes And All Is Born Again.

God, It Was Good To Let Go, Let The Tight Mask Fall Off, And The Bewildered, Chaotic Fragments Pour Out. It Was The Purge, The Catharsis.

I Am Solitary As Grass. What Is It I Miss? Shall I Ever Find It, Whatever It Is?

And You Grit Your Teeth, Despising Yourself For Your Tremulous Sensitivity, And Wondering How Human Beings Can Suffer Their Individualities To Be Mercilessly Crushed Under A Machinelike Dictatorship, Be It Of Industry, State Or Organization, All Their Lives Long.

Sunday-the Doctor's Paradise! Doctors At Country Clubs, Doctors At The Seaside, Doctors With Mistresses, Doctors With Wives, Doctors In Church, Doctors In Yachts, Doctors Everywhere Resolutely Being People, Not Doctors.

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.

Spiderlike, I Spin Mirrors, Loyal To My Image.

I Always Was Interested In Prose. As A Teenager, I Published Short Stories. And I Always Wanted To Write The Long Short Story, I Wanted To Write A Novel. Now That I Have Attained, Shall I Say, A Respectable Age, And Have Had Experiences, I Feel Much More Interested In Prose, In The Novel. I Feel That In A Novel, For Example, You Can Get In Toothbrushes And All The Paraphernalia That One Finds In Dally Life, And I Find This More Difficult In Poetry.

I Felt Dull And Flat And Full Of Shattered Visions.

I Felt Myself Melting Into The Shadows Like The Negative Of A Person I'd Never Seen Before In My Life.

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

O Love, How Did You Get Here?

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.

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

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.

I Do Not Want A Plain Box, I Want A Sarcophagus With Tigery Stripes, And A Face On It Round As The Moon, To Stare Up. I Want To Be Looking At Them When They Come Picking Among The Dumb Minerals, The Roots. I See Them Already-the Pale, Star-distance Faces. Now They Are Nothing, They Are Not Even Babies. I Imagine Them Without Fathers Or Mothers, Like The First Gods. They Will Wonder If I Was Important.

I Don’t Care About Anyone, And The Feeling Is Quite Obviously Mutual.

I Laid My Face To The Smooth Face Of The Marble And Howled My Loss Into The Cold Salt Rain.

Hour By Hour, Day By Day, Life Becomes Possible.

When I Fell Out Of The Light, I Entered The Stomach Of Indifference, The Wordless Cupboard.

...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.

If You Pluck Out My Heart To Find What Makes It Move, You’ll Halt The Clock That Syncopates Our Love.

What Did My Arms Do Before They Held You?

How Frail The Human Heart Must Be - A Mirrored Pool Of Thought.

..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.) I Should Have Loved A Thunderbird Instead; At Least When Spring Comes They Roar Back Again. I Shut My Eyes And All The World Drops Dead. (i Think I Made You Up Inside My Head.)

I Felt My Lungs Inflate With The Onrush Of Scenery—air, Mountains, Trees, People. I Thought, "this Is What It Is To Be Happy.

The One Thing I Was Good At Was Winning Scholarships And Prizes, And That Era Was Coming To An End.

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.

So Much Working, Reading, Thinking, Living To Do. A Lifetime Is Not Long Enough. Nor Youth To Old Age Long Enough. Immortality And Permanence Be Damned. Sure I Want Them, But They Are Nonexistent, And Won't Matter When I Rot Underground. All I Want To Say Is: I Made The Best Of A Mediocre Job. It Was A Good Fight While It Lasted. And So Life Goes.

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?

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.

I Cut You Out Because I Couldn't Stand Being A Passing Fancy.

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

Doreen Had Intuition. Everything She Said Was Like A Secret Voice Speaking Straight Out Of My Own Bones.

How We Need Another Soul To Cling To.

Living With Him Is Like Being Told A Perpetual Story: His Mind Is The Biggest, Most Imaginative I Have Ever Met. I Could Live In Its Growing Countries Forever.

I Wondered What I Thought I Was Burying.

No Day Is Safe From News Of You.

I Felt Dumb And Subdued. Every Time I Tried To Concentrate, My Mind Glided Off, Like A Skater, Into A Large Empty Space, And Pirouetted There, Absently.

We Must Be Moving, Working, Making Dreams To Run Toward; The Poverty Of Life Without Dreams Is Too Horrible To Imagine.

The Moon Is No Door. It Is A Face In Its Own Right, White As A Knuckle And Terribly Upset. It Drags The Sea After It Like A Dark Crime; It Is Quiet With The O-gape Of Complete Despair. I Live Here.

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.

There Must Be Quite A Few Things That A Hot Bath Won't Cure, But I Don't Know Many Of Them.

They Would Grow Old. They Would Forget Me.

A Dispassionate White Sun Shone At The Summit Of The Sky. I Wanted To Hone Myself On It Till I Grew Saintly And Thin And Essential As The Blade Of A Knife.

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Marquis De Lafayette

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