[net.suicide] Anne Sexton poem

swifty@fluke.UUCP (steve swift) (05/21/84)

int.
Even the cornea and left over 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 you tongue!--
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad bone; bruised, you'd say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
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 the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.


			Anne Sexton  2/3/64