Poems Inspired by Anne Sexton

Dear Anne Sexton,

reading you at 4am is like rosary beads on a feverish tummy
I'm writing on graph paper
because I can't find anything else
except pages and pages of beauty
in which to reside
so I write my own
and summon your ghost

i can feel the dying in me collide with the sky
the hard wood against my spine
that bruises in grave lilies

is it true that a man has 3 great loves in his life?

1.
his mother
with breasts like empty flasks
blinking sagely at the hiddenmost cupboards
of regret
regret is a...

Although we are
deux femmes suprêmes
from random decades
I know that you
and I are alike
my sororal twin

(Even though,
as you know
I, like Hamlet
lack the courage
to be a coward)

Nonetheless
I too
have two moons
which eclipse me
with such a sweet, sweet
lunacy

Each bipole tugs
tugs with its
own grave gravitation
towards either
cirrus heights or
unsounded depths –
for you know too well
one cannot savor either
without its other
     
But I do have to ask
since...

The sand is hot.
On my radio, a love song –
Who gives a fuck about soft, vulnerable people,
yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don’t. I’m giving up smoking.
47 minutes without a cigarette. But who’s counting?

I am.

Low tide. The water looks cold. I’m not going in. Fuck that.
Lying flat on my back, on my towel, naked under a tree. I am alone and chasing a tan.
The flies are bad, could be something dead nearby. Invisible cigarettes litter the backyard of my imagination, clutter my clawing solitude.

It's getting harder to move.

48...

"For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling." – Anne Sexton


You shatter my breath
with three little words
and fuck me from the inside
with hate
and still
I cannot get enough      
of you

I huddle like a lonely cigarette
left in the street lit rain
wilted and useless
decaying in a discoloured mess
into the saliva drenched side walk

I’m the shadow of a woman
that could be
if she dared to look up and confront ...