My body is useless. It lies, curled like a dog on the carpet. It has given up.

I am in the domain of silence, the kingdom of the crazy and the sleeper. There is blood here and I have eaten it.

I am in my own mind. I am locked in the wrong house.

Dreaming, dreaming, your body a boat, rocked by your life and my death.

I will be a light thing. I will enter death like someone’s lost optical lens.

But surely you know that everyone has a death, his own death, waiting for him. So I will go now without old age or disease, wildly but accurately, knowing my best route, carried by that toy donkey I rode all these years, never asking, “Where are we going?”

I know that I have died before— once in November, once in June.

Even though I dressed the body it was still naked, still killed.

Is life something you play? And all the time wanting to get rid of it?

Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.

But you, my doctor, my enthusiast, were better than Christ; you promised me another world to tell me who I was.

I threw myself down, pretending dead for eight hours. I thought I had died into a snowstorm. I lay there like an overcoat that someone had thrown away.

I was tired of being a woman, tired of the spoons and the pots, tired of my mouth and my breasts, tired of the cosmetics and the silks.

Like Oedipus, I am losing my sight. Like Judas, I have done my wrong.

I was locked in my room all day behind a gate, a prison cell. I was the exile who sat all day in a knot.

To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth … Thomas Wolfe

Thief!— how did you crawl into, crawl down alone into the death I wanted so badly and for so long, the death we said we both outgrew, the one we wore on our skinny breasts, the one we talked of so often each time we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston, the death that talked of analysts and cures, the death that talked like brides with plots, the death we drank to, the motives and then the quiet deed?

O Mary, permit me this grace, this crossing over, although I am ugly, submerged in my own past and my own madness.

All this is death. In the mind there is a thin alley called death, and I move through it as through water.

My body is useless. It lies, curled like a dog on the carpet. It has given up.

I am in the domain of silence, the kingdom of the crazy and the sleeper. There is blood here and I have eaten it.

I am in my own mind. I am locked in the wrong house.

But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters, they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.

Dreaming, dreaming, your body a boat, rocked by your life and my death.

I will be a light thing. I will enter death like someone’s lost optical lens.

Even the wasps cannot find my eyes. Yes, eyes that were immediate once. Eyes that have been truly awake, eyes that told the whole story— poor dumb animals.

But surely you know that everyone has a death, his own death, waiting for him. So I will go now without old age or disease, wildly but accurately, knowing my best route, carried by that toy donkey I rode all these years, never asking, “Where are we going?”

I know that I have died before— once in November, once in June.

Mother frowned at my wasted life. My father smoked cigars. My cheeks blossomed with maggots. I picked at them like pearls. I covered them with pancake.

Sleepmonger, deathmonger, with capsules in my palms each night, eight at a time from sweet pharmaceutical bottles I make arrangements for a pint-sized journey.

My supply of tablets has got to last for years and years. I like them more than I like me. Stubborn as hell, they won’t let go. It’s a kind of marriage. It’s a kind of war where I plant bombs inside myself. Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I’m hung up on it.

I kept right on going on, a sort of human statement, lugging myself as if I were a sawed-off body in the trunk, the steamer trunk.

Even though I dressed the body it was still naked, still killed.

Is life something you play? And all the time wanting to get rid of it? And further, everyone yelling at you to shut up. And no wonder!