I am God, la de dah.

Some women marry houses.

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I...

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the...

Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.

We were fair game but we have kept out of the cesspool. We are strong. We are the good ones. Do not discover us for we lie together all in green like pond weeds. Hold...

As it has been said:Love and a coughcannot be concealed.Even a small cough.Even a small love.

Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.

I like you; your eyes are full of language.”[Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]

I am stuffing your mouth with yourpromises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoesin the stone boats. They are more like stonethan the sea would be if it stopped. They refuseto be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Clover[‘s] eyes are full of language.

Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.

Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.

Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.

Watch out for intellect,because it knows so much it knows nothingand leaves you hanging upside down,mouthing knowledge as your heartfalls out of your mouth.

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.

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.

KELİMELERKelimelere dikkat et,Özellikle mucizevi olanlara.Mucizevi olanlar için en iyisini yaparız, Bazen böcek sürüsü gibi toplanırlarSokmazlar ama bir öpücük bırakırlar.Parmaklar kadar iyi olabilirler.Oturduğun kaya kadar güvenilir…Aynı zamanda hem papatyalar hem de yaralar gibi…Sözcüklere aşığım, evet.Tavandan sarkan...

Do you like me?”No answer.Silence bounced, fell off his tongueand sat between usand clogged my throat.It slaughtered my trust.It tore cigarettes out of my mouth.We exchanged blind words,and I did not cry,I did not beg,but...

Quite collected at cocktail parties,meanwhile in my headI’m undergoing open-heart surgery.

WordsBe careful of words,even the miraculous ones.For the miraculous we do our best,sometimes they swarm like insectsand leave not a sting but a kiss.They can be as good as fingers.They can be as trusty as...

Depression is boring, I thinkand I would do better to makesome soup and light up the cave.

Live or die, but don’t poison everything.

That’s what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn’t worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow

The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives

God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of...

Anne, I don’t want to live. . . . Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can’t Live It. I can’t even explain. I know how silly it sounds . . . but if you...

He turns the key.Presto!It opens this book of odd taleswhich transform the Brothers Grimm.Transform?As if an enlarged paper clipcould be a piece of sculpture.(And it could.)

Fee-fi-fo-fum -Now I’m borrowed.Now I’m numb.

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...

Wanting to Die Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.Then the almost unnameable lust returns.Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass...

Each night I am nailed into placeand forget who I am.Daddy? That’s another kind of prison.It’s not the prince at all, but my fatherdrunkeningly bends over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, my...

Many women are singing together of this: one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine, one is at the aquarium tending a seal, one is dull at the wheel of her Ford, one is...

exI 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...

Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.