The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood. - Anne Sexton

Everyone in me is a bird.
I am beating my wings.
They wanted to cut you out
but they will not.
They said you were immeasurably empty
bu you are not.
They said you were sick unto dying
but they were wrong.
You are winging like a school girl.
You are not torn.

"Going Gone

Over stone walls and barns,
miles from the black-eyed Susans,
over circus tents and moon rockets
you are going, going.
You who have inhabited me
in the deepest and most broken place,
are going, going.
An old woman calls up to you
from her deathbed deep in sores,
asking, "What do you keep of her?"
She is the crone in the fables.
She is the fool at the supper
and you, sir, are the traveler.
Although you are in a hurry
you stop to open a small basket
and under layers of petticoats
you show her the tiger-striped eyes
that you have lately plucked,
you show her specialty, the lips,
those two small bundles,
you show her the two hands
that grip her fiercely,
one being mine, one being yours.
Torn right off at the wrist bone
when you started in your
impossible going, gone.
Then you place the basket
in the old woman's hollow lap
and as a last act she fondles
these artifacts like a child's head
and murmurs, "Precious. Precious."
And you are glad you have given
them to this one for she too
is making a trip."

I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.