Oceans Deep

Reading Anne Sexton is like slitting your wrist slowly over time. 

Perhaps I am no one.
True, I have a body
And I cannot escape from it.
I would like to fly out of my head,
But that is out of the question.
It is written on the tablet of destiny
That I am stuck here in this human form.
That being the case
I would like to call attention to my problem.
- THE POET OF IGNORANCE, © Anne Sexton

Of course, what good is a poet, or for that matter a poem, without a bit of angst, without something to rage against, without something to bring us close to tears, make us think.  Without feeling, wouldn’t it just be words on a page to keep turning and turning and turning, without taking a moment to breathe it all in.  Read with care, someone should advertise, maybe it would be better to read her in small doses.  It wouldn't do to come undone, you are after all only the reader.

Yes
I try
To kill myself in small amounts,
An innocuous occupation.
Actually I'm hung up on it.
But remember I don't make too much noise.
And frankly no one has to lug me out
And I don't stand there in my winding sheet.
I'm a little buttercup in my yellow nightie
Eating my eight loaves in a row
And in a certain orders as in
The laying of hands
Or the black sacrament.
- THE ADDICT, © Anne Sexton

I used to have notebooks of notebooks filled with poetry.  The kind of things written down that you'd never want anyone else to read.  Tucked away in every nook and cranny they'd be hidden, thirsty for ink, waiting.  In the glove compartment, in the nightstand, in the dresser, in the drawer in the kitchen.  Always somewhere handy, lingering at the surface, waiting to be found.  But how embarrassing it would be to have these thoughts running amok through someone else's mind, open for misinterpretation.

When my Grandmother died, I remember sending my cousin Dan to the store to buy me a notebook, too unfamiliar with the city myself to venture out.  And I wrote that night on smurf blue pages no bigger than an index card, wrote until there was nothing more I could write. 

The sounds of an unfamiliar city herald the news that you are gone.
And I am lost without you
Here in the dark, standing beneath the stars on a balcony high above the ground,
Watching the glowing ember of a cigarette burning cherry red -
Though I stopped smoking years ago.

And I'm unsure of what to do,
Though my anger could fill a thousand rooms.
And I am like electricty charged without an outlet for my grief.
Standing here numb, cold black railing beneath my hands,
My voice begs to scream at the night, I wasn't there to say goodbye.
I am not ready to let you go.

You who loved me without condition
Face of my face, heart of my heart.
You who took my young hands and
Showed me the art of making meatballs,
Cooked me tubettini and ladled it into great big bowls
As we sat together in the kitchen.

Because you were my escape.
The one place where I was always safe,
And at night I'd sleep beside you in your bed,
Comforted by the sounds of your snores, my
Small body pressed up against the wall, between you and the door.
Safe from the monsters beneath the beds and the ghosts that shadowed the walls.

You can't be gone.
You can't be gone.
I don’t know how to love - to live - without you.
- © Stacey