But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.
I was my own woman.
The next step was to find the proper sort of man.
Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I’ll laugh. And then I’ll know what life is.
I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three… nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn’t see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.
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 on hour more of sleep and live.
How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.
What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and, ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.
I didn’t want any flowers, I only wantedTo lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.How free it is, you have no idea how free——The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.–from Tulips, written 18 March 1961
Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those.
The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of starsLetting in the light, peephole after peephole— A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.–from Insomniac, written April 1961
For me, the real issues of our time are the issues of every time—the hurt and wonder of loving; making in all its forms—children, loaves of bread, paintings, buildings; and the conservation of life of all people in all places, the jeopardizing of which no abstract doubletalk of ‘peace’ or ‘implacable foes’ can excuse. (Context, 1962)
Not easy to state the change you made.If I’m alive now, I was dead,Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.
August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.
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 told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn’t believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.
I have stitched life into me like a rare organ–from Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices, written 1962
The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven — and usually the physical comforts they endow it with are naively the kind that can be perceived as we humans perceive — nothing more. No: perhaps I will awake to find myself burning in hell. I think not. I think I will be snuffed out. Black is sleep; black is a fainting spell; and black is death, with no light, no waking.
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.
I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three… nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn’t see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.
Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.
I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.
The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.
There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.
Dying Is an art, like everything else.I do it exceptionally well.I do it so it feels like hell.I do it so it feels real.I guess you could say I have a call.
How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.