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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.

-Sylvia Plath

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The Night Sky Is

Sylvia Plath

...

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.

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

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 Guess They Call It Suicide, But I'm To Full To Swallow My Pride I Can't Stand Losing You The Police Dying Is An Art, Like Everything Else. I Do It Exceptionally Well.

There Is More Than One Good Way To Drown.

I Didn’t Want Any Flowers, I Only Wanted To Lie With My Hands Turned Up And Be Utterly Empty. How Free It Is, You Have No Idea How Free.

Your Body Hurts Me As The World Hurts God

I Am Sure There Are Things That Can't Be Cured By A Good Bath But I Can't Think Of One.

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 Want To Force Myself Again And Again To Leave The Warmth And Security Of Static Situations And Move Into The World Of Growth And Suffering Where The Real Books Are People's Minds And Souls.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

There Is No Life Higher Than The Grasstops

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

You Ask Me Why I Spend My Life Writing? Do I Find Entertainment? Is It Worthwhile? Above All, Does It Pay? If Not, Then, Is There A Reason?... I Write Only Because There Is A Voice Within Me. That Will Not Be Still.

It Is Awful To Want To Go Away And To Want To Go Nowhere.

Winter Dawn Is The Color Of Metal, The Trees Stiffen Into Place Like Burnt Nerves.

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.

I Get Into A Rut, Unable To Yank My Mind Out Of It.

Every Day Is Precious And I Feel Infinitely Sad At This Time Melting Away From Me.

No Day Is Safe From News Of You.

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.

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.

I May Never Be Happy, But Tonight I Am Content.

I Must Bridge The Gap Between Adolescent Glitter And Mature Glow.

This Is The Light Of The Mind, Cold And Planetary. The Trees Of The Mind Are Black. The Light Is Blue.

Love Is The Bone And Sinew Of My Curse.

What Is My Life For And What Am I Going To Do With It? I Don't Know And I'm Afraid.

I Am Terrified By This Dark Thing That Sleeps In Me; All Day I Feel Its Soft, Feathery Turnings, Its Malignity. Clouds Pass And Disperse. Are Those The Faces Of Love, Those Pale Irretrievables? Is It For Such I Agitate My Heart? I Am Incapable Of More Knowledge. What Is This, This Face So Murderous In Its Strangle Of Branches? - Its Snaky Acids Kiss. It Petrifies The Will. These Are The Isolate, Slow Faults That Kill, That Kill, That Kill.

I Am Myself. That Is Not Enough.

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

What Is So Real As The Cry Of A Child?

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

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

There Is Nothing Like Puking With Somebody To Make You Into Old Friends.

Funny Best Friend

My Mother Said The Cure For Thinking Too Much About Yourself Was Helping Somebody Who Was Worse Off Than You.

The First Time It Happened I Was Ten. It Was An Accident. The Second Time I Meant To Last It Out And Not Come Back At All. I Rocked Shut As A Seashell. They Had To Call And Call And Pick The Worms Off Me Like Sticky Pearls. Dying Is An Art, Like Everything Else. I Do It Exceptionally Well. I Do It So It Feels Like Hell. I Do It So It Feels Real. I Guess You Could Say I've A Call.

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

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 Felt Like A Racehorse In A World Without Racetracks Or A Champion College Footballer Suddenly Confronted By Wall Street And A Business Suit, His Days Of Glory Shrunk To A Little Gold Cup On His Mantel With A Date Engraved On It Like The Date On A Tombstone.

A Million Years Of Evolution, Eric Said Bitterly, And What Are We? Animals.

Mother Of Otherness, Eat Me.

I Am Sending Back The Key That Let Me Into Bluebeard's Study; Because He Would Make Love To Me I Am Sending Back The Key; In His Eye's Darkroom I Can See My X-rayed Heart, Dissected Body: I Am Sending Back The Key That Let Me Into Bluebeard S Study.

Piece By Piece, I Fed My Wardrobe To The Night Wind, And Flutteringly, Like A Loved One’s Ashes, The Gray Scraps Were Ferried Off, To Settle Here, There, Exactly Where I Would Never Know, In The Dark Heart Of New York.

I Do Not Know Who I Am, Where I Am Going - And I Am The One Who Has To Decide The Answers To These Hideous Questions.

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.

The Sickness Rolled Through Me In Great Waves. After Each Wave It Would Fade Away And Leave Me Limp As A Wet Leaf And Shivering All Over And Then I Would Feel It Rising Up In Me Again, And The Glittering White Torture Chamber Tiles Under My Feet And Over My Head And All Four Sides Closed In And Squeezed Me To Pieces.

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."

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

Can You Understand? Someone, Somewhere, Can You Understand Me A Little, Love Me A Little?

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.

I Felt Dull And Flat And Full Of Shattered Visions.

...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.

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.

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

Nothing Stinks Like A Pile Of Unpublished Writing.

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

I Would Catch Sight Of Some Flawless Man Off In The Distance, But As Soon As He Moved Closer I Immediately Saw He Wouldn’t Do At All.

Beached Under The Spumy Blooms, We Lie Sea-sick And Fever-dry.

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.

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.

What Have I Eaten? Lies And Smiles.

A Man's World Is Different From A Woman's World And A Man's Emotions Are Different From A Woman's Emotions And Only Marriage Can Bring The Two Different Sets Of Emotions Together Properly.

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.

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.

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

God, How I Ricochet Between Certainties And Doubts.

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.

I Like You, But Not Too Much. I Don’t Want To Like Anybody Too Much.

What Did My Arms Do Before They Held You?

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.

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

I Must Get My Soul Back From You; I Am Killing My Flesh Without It.

Like A Cat I Have Nine Times To Die.

I Thought It Sounded Just Like The Sort Of Drug A Man Would Invent. Here Was A Woman In Terrible Pain, Obviously Feeling Every Bit Of It Or She Wouldn't Groan Like That, And She Would Go Straight Home And Start Another Baby, Because The Drug Would Make Her Forget How Bad The Pain Had Been, When All The Time, In Some Secret Part Of Her, That Long, Blind, Doorless And Windowless Corridor Or Pain Was Waiting To Open Up And Shut Her In Again.

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?

Do We Always Grind Through The Present, Doomed To Throw A Gold Haze Of Fond Retrospect Over The Past?

That Afternoon My Mother Had Brought Me The Roses. "save Them For My Funeral," I'd Said.

It Seemed Silly To Wash One Day When I Would Only Have To Wash Again The Next. It Made Me Tired Just To Think Of It.

Yes, My Consuming Desire Is To Mingle With Road Crews, Sailors And Soldiers, Barroom Regulars - To Be A Part Of A Scene, Anonymous, Listening, Recording - All This Is Spoiled By The Fact That I Am A Girl, A Female Always Supposedly In Danger Of Assault And Battery. My Consuming Interest In Men And Their Lives Is Often Misconstrued As A Desire To Seduce Them, Or As An Invitation To Intimacy. Yes, God, I Want To Talk To Everybody As Deeply As I Can. I Want To Be Able To Sleep In An Open Field, To Travel West, To Walk Freely At Night.

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.

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

I've Eaten A Bag Of Green Apples. Boarded The Train, There's No Getting Off

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

I Love Life. But It Is Hard And I Have So Much, So Very Much To Learn.

I Saw Myself Sitting In The Crotch Of This Fig Tree, Starving To Death, Just Because I Couldn't Make Up My Mind Which Of The Figs I Would Choose. I Wanted Each And Every One Of Them, But Choosing One Meant Loosing All The Rest, And, As I Sat There, Unable To Decide, The Figs Began To Wrinkle And Go Black, And, One By One, They Plopped To The Ground At My Feet.

Feel Oddly Barren. My Sickness Is When Words Draw In Their Horns And The Physical World Refuses To Be Ordered, Recreated, Arranged And Selected. I Am A Victim Of It Then, Not A Master.

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 Want To Taste And Glory In Each Day, And Never Be Afraid To Experience Pain; And Never Shut Myself Up In A Numb Core Of Nonfeeling, Or Stop Questioning And Criticizing Life And Take The Easy Way Out. To Learn And Think: To Think And Live; To Live And Learn: This Always, With New Insight, New Understanding, And New Love.

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

If They Substituted The Word 'lust' For 'love' In The Popular Songs It Would Come Nearer The Truth.

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.

Everything In Life Is Writable.

The Sun Gives You Ulcers, The Wind Gives You T.b. Once You Were Beautiful.

Good To Know That If I Ever Need Attention All I Have To Do Is Die.

Oh What A Poet I Will Flay Myself Into.

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

The Silence Between Us Was So Profound I Thought Part Of It Must Be My Fault.

There Is A Certain Clinical Satisfaction In Seeing Just How Bad Things Can Get.

Compared With Me, A Tree Is Immortal.

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.

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.

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.

And There's The Fallacy Of Existence: The Idea That One Could Be Happy Forever And Age With A Given Situation Or Series Of Accomplishments.

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

It Was Like The First Time I Saw A Cadaver. For Weeks Afterward The Cadavers Head, Or What Was Left Of It - Floated Up Behind My Eggs And Bacon At Breakfast And In The Face Of Buddy Willard, Who Was Responsible For My Seeing It In The First Place, And Pretty Soon I Felt As Though I Were Carrying That Cadavers Head Around With Me On A String, Like Some Black, Noseless Balloon Stinking Of Vinegar.

I Want To Be Silverly Beautiful.

That’s One Of The Reasons I Never Wanted To Get Married. The Last Thing I Wanted Was Infinite Security And To Be The Place An Arrow Shoots Off From. I Wanted Change And Excitement And To Shoot Off In All Directions Myself, Like The Colored Arrows From A Fourth Of July Rocket.

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

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.

Winter Is For Women The Woman Still At Her Knitting, At The Cradle Of Spanish Walnut, Her Body A Bulb In The Cold And Too Dumb To Think.

…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.

I Have Let Things Slip, A Thirty-year~old Cargo Boat Stubbornly Hanging On To My Name And Address.

I Buried My Head Under The Darkness Of The Pillow And Pretended It Was Night. I Couldn't See The Point Of Getting Up. I Had Nothing To Look Forward To.

There Is A Certain Unique And Strange Delight About Walking Down An Empty Street Alone. There Is An Off-focus Light Cast By The Moon, And The Streetlights Are Part Of The Spotlight Apparatus On A Bare Stage Set Up For You To Walk Through. You Get A Feeling Of Being Listened To, So You Talk Aloud, Softly, To See How It Sounds.

I Keep Wanting To Crawl Back Into The Womb.

Yes, There Is Joy, Fulfillment And Companionship But The Loneliness Of The Soul In Its Appalling Self-consciousness Is Horrible And Overpowering.

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

I'm Doped And Thick From My Last Sleeping Pill.

I Didn’t Want Any Flowers, I Only Wanted To Lie With My Hands Turned Up And Be Utterly Empty. How Free It Is, You Have No Idea How Free—— The Peacefulness Is So Big It Dazes You, And It Asks Nothing, A Name Tag, A Few Trinkets. It Is What The Dead Close On, Finally; I Imagine Them Shutting Their Mouths On It, Like A Communion Tablet.

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

When They Asked Me What I Wanted To Be I Said I Didn’t Know. "oh, Sure You Know," The Photographer Said. "she Wants," Said Jay Cee Wittily, "to Be Everything.

I Am Made, Crudely, For Success.

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.

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

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.

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

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

I Am Afraid. I Am Not Solid, But Hollow. I Feel Behind My Eyes A Numb, Paralyzed Cavern, A Pit Of Hell, A Mimicking Nothingness.

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

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

I Have This Demon Who Wants Me To Run Away Screaming If I Am Going To Be Flawed, Fallible. It Wants Me To Think I'm So Good I Must Be Perfect. Or Nothing. I Am, On The Contrary, Something: A Being Who Gets Tired, Has Shyness To Fight, Has More Trouble Than Most Facing People Easily.

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

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

How Can You Be So Many Women To So Many Strange People, Oh You Strange Girl?

Every Day One Has To Earn The Name Of 'writer' Over Again, With Much Wrestling.

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

Is Anyone Anywhere Happy?

And What Is Happy? It Is A Going Always On. There Is Something Better To Be Done Than I Have Done, And Spurred By The Fair Delusion Of Progress, I Will Seek To Progress, To Whip Myself On, To More And More- To Learning. Always.

The Constant Struggle In Mature Life, I Think, Is To Accept The Necessity Of Tragedy And Conflict, And Not To Try To Escape To Some Falsely Simple Solution Which Does Not Include These More Somber Complexities.

God, If Ever I Have Come Close To Wanting To Commit Suicide, It Is Now, With The Groggy Sleepless Blood Dragging Through My Veins, And The Air Thick And Gray With Rain ... I Fell Into Bed Again This Morning, Begging For Sleep, Withdrawing Into The Dark, Warm, Fetid Escape From Action, From Responsibility. No Good.

From The Night Buddy Willard Kissed Me And Said I Must Go Out With A Lot Of Boys, He Made Me Feel I Was Much More Sexy And Experienced Than He Was And That Everything He Did Like Hugging And Kissing And Petting Was Simply What I Made Him Feel Like Doing Out Of The Blue, He Couldn’t Help It And Didn’t Know How It Came About. Now I Saw He Had Only Been Pretending All This Time To Be So Innocent.

The Man Creates A Pseudonym And Hides Behind It Like A Worm

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.

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

The Thing About Writing Is Not To Talk, But To Do It; No Matter How Bad Or Even Mediocre It Is, The Process And Production Is The Thing, Not The Sitting And Theorizing About How One Should Write Ideally, Or How Well One Could Write If One Really Wanted To Or Had The Time.

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

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.

I Had Been Alone More Than I Could Have Been Had I Gone By Myself.

Could Have Been

I Am Silver And Exact.i Have No Preconceptions.

I Don't Know What Started Me, I Just Wrote Poetry From The Time Was Quite Small. I Guess I Liked Nursery Rhymes And I Guess I Thought I Could Do The Same Thing. I Wrote My First Poem, My First Published Poem, When I Was Eight-and-a-half Years Old. It Came Out In The Boston Traveller And From Then On, I Suppose, I've Been A Bit Of A Professional.

Cold Glass, How You Insert Yourself Between Myself And Myself. I Scratch Like A Cat. The Blood That Runs Is Dark Fruit- An Effect, A Cosmetic. You Smile. No, It Is Not Fatal.

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 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 Knew Chemistry Would Be Worse, Because I'd Seen A Big Card Of The Ninety-odd Elements Hung Up In The Chemistry Lab, And All The Perfectly Good Words Like Gold And Silver And Cobalt And Aluminum Were Shortened To Ugly Abbreviations With Different Decimal Numbers After Them.

Out Of The Ash I Rise With My Red Hair And I Eat Men Like Air.

Not Being Perfect Hurts.

Not Being Perfect

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.

The Floor Seemed Wonderfully Solid. It Was Comforting To Know I Had Fallen And Could Fall No Farther.

I Am Flushed And Warm. I Think I May Be Enormous, I Am So Stupidly Happy, My Wellingtons Squelching And Squelching Through The Beautiful Red.

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

Perhaps When We Find Ourselves Wanting Everything, It Is Because We Are Dangerously Close To Wanting Nothing.

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

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

I Cannot Life For Life Itself: But For The Words Which Stay The Flux. My Life, I Feel, Will Not Be Lived Until There Are Books And Stories Which Relive It Perpetually In Time. I Forget Too Easily How It Was, And Shrink To The Horror Of The Here And Now, With No Past And No Future. Writing Breaks Open The Vaults Of The Dead And The Skies Behind Which The Prophesying Angels Hide. The Mind Makes And Makes, Spinning Its Web.

A Bad Dream.to The Person In The Bell Jar, Blank And Stopped As A Dead Baby, The World Itself Is The Bad Dream.a Bad Dream.i Remembered Everything.i Remembered The Cadavers And Doreen And The Story Of The Fig-tree And Marco's Diamond And The Sailor On The Common And Doctor Gordon's Wall-eyed Nurse And The Broken Thermometers And The Negro With His Two Kinds Of Beans And The Twenty Pounds I Gained On Insulin And The Rock That Bulged Between Sky And Sea Like A Grey Skull.maybe Forgetfulness, Like A Kind Snow, Should Numb And Cover Them.but They Were Part Of Me. They Were My Landscape

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

Time Of My Life

You Know What Lies Are For.

It Was My First Big Chance, But Here I Was, Sitting Back And Letting It Run Through My Fingers Like So Much Water.

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.

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

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

I Was My Own Woman. The Next Step Was To Find The Proper Sort Of Man.

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.

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.

The Abstract Kills, The Concrete Saves.

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.

Slowly, Slowly, Catch The Monkey.

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.

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

I Hurl My Heart To Halt His Pace.

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

Perhaps, Perhaps This Would Be The One To Pull Me Out Of My Plunge.

As I Lay On My Back In Bed Staring Up At The Blank, White Ceiling The Stillness Seemed To Grow Bigger And Bigger Until I Felt My Eardrums Would Burst With It.

For Me, Poetry Is An Evasion Of The Real Job Of Writing Prose.

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

Cheers For Spring; For Life; For A Growing Soul.

God, Is This All It Is, The Ricocheting Down The Corridor Of Laughter And Tears? Of Self-worship And Self-loathing? Of Glory And Disgust?

Opinions Are Like Orgasms...mine Matters Most And I Really Don't Care If You Have One.

For The Few Little Successes I May Seem To Have, There Are Acres Of Misgivings And Self-doubt.

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

The Claw Of The Magnolia, Drunk On Its Own Scents, Asks Nothing Of Life.

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

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.

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Richard Simmons

Herbert Kaufman

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