The Heart Asks Pleasure First Emily Dickinson
Poem lyrics of The Heart Asks Pleasure First by Emily Dickinson.
The heart asks pleasure first
And then, excuse from pain-
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;
And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.
It is interesting to me that you thought it might have been Plath.
I guess I have thought about suicide a lot of over the past sixty years. But I am such a procrastinator and now it is too late. Thought about it a lot only consciously tried it once and that was in 1948, I was about seven or eight locked in a closet sobbing tears of a child that felt unloved. Whether I meant to or whether I was just playing hangman I am not sure, but I come close, scared myself, tearing at the belt around my neck in panic. Strange how much more I appreciate Kerouac now that I know he was a virtual suicide. But for a child to commit suicide that is the most horrible thought I can have at the moment.
I have only known two adults that have done away with them selves, no three. Two father’s who had lost their businesses and were despondent about how they were going to take care of their families. I suppose they did it for the money. And one young guy in his twenties who did it because there were aliens from outer space trying to make him change his chromosomes and if he did not they were going to make him kill himself
It is good to rattle those bones, I call it doing the existential strip tease. But everything posted on this net has consequences. We could start that debate over toleration again, this is one fucked up country right now. As Nietzsche said god save us from the improvers of mankind.
Those myspace pages come back to haunt people I say, I think about the fourteen year kid that killed herself, and the guy who was sending her messages egging her on. Not the mother of the other girl, but some peckerhead who thought it was funny.
There was a time in my twenties when I could not get to sleep at night with out the thought of a rifle under my chin my finger on the trigger. I never actually put one there, did not even own a rifle but the thought was there consistently.
Speaking of a poem by plath
This one stays with me
I tried to understand her death, realized I could not because anatomy is destiny sometimes, and some say it was a fatal case of PMS. What would I know about that? So I say thank you dear Sylvia Hughes Plath, it is your life’s work that learned me, not your death
Mystic
The air is a mill of hooks --
Questions without answer,
Glittering and drunk as flies
Whose kiss stings unbearably
In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer.
I remember
The dead smell of sun on wood cabins,
The stiffness of sails, the long salt winding sheets.
Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?
Once one has been seized up
Without a part left over,
Not a toe, not a finger, and used,
Used utterly, in the sun's conflagration, the stains
That lengthen from ancient cathedrals
What is the remedy?
The pill of the Communion tablet,
The walking beside still water? Memory?
Or picking up the bright pieces
Of Christ in the faces of rodents,
The tame flower-nibblers, the ones
Whose hopes are so low they are comfortable --
The humpback in his small, washed cottage
Under the spokes of the clematis.
Is there no great love, only tenderness?
Does the sea
Remember the walker upon it?
Meaning leaks from the molecules.
The chimneys of the city breathe, the window sweats,
The children leap in their cots.
The sun blooms, it is a geranium.
The heart has not stopped.
Sylvia Plath
Sorry for the ramble
the topic of suicide always trips my trigger
Eversince those space aliens killed my friend
I wished I could have been more help to him
but I was too busy feeling sorry for myself
with my own gender issues.
Sisypuss
was a truck driver
roll on
Graphics are great in a too-much-words-world!!!
right side up
one more time
