33 quotes
I rot on the wall, my own
Dorian Gray.
To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)
I am alive when your fingers are.
Love Poems (1969)
Earth, earth
riding your merry-go-round
toward extinction,
right to the roots
thickening the oceans like gravy,
festering in your caves,
you are becoming a latrine.
The Complete Poems (1981)
Here in the hospital, I say,
that is not my body, not my body.
I am not here for the doctors
to read like a recipe.
Words for Dr. Y (1978)
I begin again, Dr.Y,
this neverland journal,
full of my own sense of filth.
Why else keep a journal, if not
to examine your own filth?
Words for Dr. Y (1978)
As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.
Love Poems (1969)
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, ...
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
Fact: death too is in the egg.
Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat.
And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet.
All My Pretty Ones (1962)
Need is not quite belief.
All My Pretty Ones (1962)
I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss.
I am pushing knives through the hands
that created two into one.
Our hands do not bleed at this,
they lie still in their dishonor.
And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
All My Pretty Ones (1962)
I grow old on my bitterness.
Live or Die (1966)
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)