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Anne Sexton - Wanting To Die

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the most unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

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.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don't always die,
but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue! --
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad bone; bruised, you'd say,

and yet she waits for me, year and year,
to so delicately undo an old would,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of a book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

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Added: Feb 20 2003 | Viewed: 17834 times | Comments and analysis of Wanting To Die by Anne Sexton Comments (20)

Wanting To Die - Comments and Information

Poet: Anne Sexton
Poem: Wanting To Die
Volume: Live Or Die
Year: Published/Written in 1964
Poem of the Day: Aug 17 2007

Comment 20 of 20, added on May 14th, 2013 at 2:06 PM.
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Comment 18 of 20, added on February 28th, 2013 at 7:11 PM.
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