Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928 - October 4, 1974), born Anne Gray Harvey, was an American poet and writer. She won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1967 for Live or Die.
Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.
The snow has quietness in it; no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice shocks me.
Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.
I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...
I lay there silently, hoarding my small dignity. I did not ask about the gate or the closet. I did not question the bedtime ritual where, on the cold bathroom tiles, I was spread out daily and examined for flaws.
I did not know that my bones, those solids, those pieces of sculpture would not splinter.
To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
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The real me lives in words, not in what words mean.
I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.
God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.
But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.
Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.
Some women marry houses.
Rats live on no evil star
We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.