Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements.
Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul.
There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get.
The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.
All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.
The journey over the bridge had unnerved me. The river water passed me by like an untouched drink. I suspected that even if my mother and brother had not been there I would have made no move to jump.
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 claw of the magnolia, drunk on its own scents, asks nothing of life.
A black-sharded lady keeps me in a parrot cage.
I feel, am mad as any writer must in one way be; why not make it real? I am too close to the bourgeois society of suburbia: too close to people I know I must sever my self from them, or be a part of their world: this half and half compromise is intolerable.
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.
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 am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a dayspare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote.
For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.
What I want back is what I was Before the bed, before the knife, Before the brooch-pin and the salve Fixed me in this parenthesis; Horses fluent in the wind, A place, a time gone out of mind.
When I fell out of the light, I entered The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.
It is best to meet in a cul-de-sac, A palace of velvet With windows of mirrors. There one is safe, There are no family photographs, No rings through the nose, no cries.
A fierce brief fusion which dreamers call real, and realists, an illusion; an insight like the flight of birds...
I want to kill myself, to escape from responsiblity, to crawl abjectly back into the womb.