My mother smiled. “I knew my baby wasn’t like that.”I looked at her. “Like what?””Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital.” She paused. “I knew you’d decide to be all right...

Ready for a new life

I?I walk alone;The midnight streetSpins itself from under my feet;My eyes shutThese dreaming houses all snuff out;Through a whim of mineOver gables the moon’s celestial onionHangs high.IMake houses shrinkAnd trees diminishBy going far; my look’s...

Dancing is the normal prelude to intercourse

I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.

I fancied you’d return the way you said,But I grow old and I forget your name. –From the poem “Mad Girl’s Love Song

Very few people do this any more. It’s too risky. First of all, it’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,White as a knuckle and terribly upset.It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quietWith the O-gape of complete...

Nick and the CandlestickI am a miner. The light burns blue. Waxy stalactitesDrip and thicken, tearsThe earthen wombExudes from its dead boredom. Black bat airsWrap me, raggy shawls, Cold homicides.They weld to me like plums.Old...

I am drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness – and even I am not strong enough to deny the routine, the rote, to simplify. No, I go plodding on, afraid that the blank hell in...

I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.

The color scheme of the whole sanatorium seemed to be based on liver. Dark, glowering woodwork, burnt-brown leather chairs, walls that might once have been white but had succumbed under a spreading malady of mod...

Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

Talking about my fears to others feeds it.

After all, I wasn’t crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn’t know when to stop.

All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig...

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one...

I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

I Am VerticalBut I would rather be horizontal.I am not a tree with my root in the soilSucking up minerals and motherly loveSo that each March I may gleam into leaf,Nor am I the beauty...

This boy – his name was Eric – said he thought it disgusting the way all the girls at my college stood around on the porches under the porch lights and in the bushes in...

I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap...

I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself.

The trouble about jumping was that if you didn’t pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.

This is newness: every little tawdryObstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,Glinting and clinking in a saint’s falsetto. Only youDon’t know what to make of the sudden slippiness,The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.There’s no getting up it by...

The main point of the article was that a man’s world is different from a women’s world and a man’s emotions are different from a women’s emotions and only marriage can bring the two worlds...

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to...

Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought...

I wonder why I don’t go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip...

God, who am I?

enemy?

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Sometimes I feel like I’m not solid. I’m hollow. There’s nothing behind my eyes. I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the...

Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take...

The blood jet is poetryThere is no stopping it.

So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts...

Slowly I swam up from the bottom of a black sleep.

And of course I didn’t know who would marry me now that I’d been where I had been. I didn’t know at all.

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive...

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bedAnd sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.”(Initiation)

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of the soul, body and pride of man?