“A black-sharded lady keeps me in a parrot cage.”

“They had to call and callAnd pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.--From the poem "Lady Lazarus", written 23-29 October 1962”

“Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing - singing, laughing, learning.”

“If you have no past or no future, which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide. But the cold reasoning mass of gray entrail in my cranium which parrots, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ whispers that there is always the turning, the upgrade, the new slant. And so I wait.”

“Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.And the message of the yew tree is blackness--blackness and silence.”

“The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven — and usually the physical comforts they endow it with are naively the kind that can be perceived as we humans perceive — nothing more. No: perhaps I will awake to find myself burning in hell. I think not. I think I will be snuffed out. Black is sleep; black is a fainting spell; and black is death, with no light, no waking.”

“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.”