At night, alone, I marry my bed

I would have a glass of Cabernet Merlot (Cape Mentelle for preference) and a volume of Anne Sexton. Soft music would weep through the speakers. Marianne Faithful. Era. Enigma. Steam rising in a shadowy bathroom. Warm water soothes tired limbs, a weary heart. I close a fist over the shards of shattered glass and feel a thrill, a shock of pain. Blood flows lazily into the bath. I take one and run it casually across my wrist. You have to do it vertically so you nick more veins. Those thick blue snakes rising under transparent skin. The incisions do not have to be deep. After all, death is an art and I do not want to shuffle off this mortal coil clumsy and graceless, the way I shuffled onto it.

A sip of wine, and I would pick up my Sexton. She would tell me that death is an old belonging. That's nice. I would like to belong somewhere. Finally. Here, in the august company of the people who fell off the edge of the world, having no place else to go, I belong.

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.

Sexton understood. She saw that it was not a matter for trumpets or tinsel. But rather, a sadness, a knowing, a sense of resignation. One is tired. One wants to choose one's own end. There is neither fear nor apprehension. Apprehension signals doubt and doubt leads to last-minute goodbyes that cause eleventh hour interventions.

I said goodbye a long time ago. You just weren't listening.

Waiting to Die is almost a meditative musing of someone who sees her suicide as an inevitability. She understands the arguments...but you see, they make no sense. Not anymore.

Even then I have nothing against life
I know well the grass blades you mention
the furniture under the sun.

She calls it, the death we both said we outgrew in Sylvia's Death. It was secretly obvious to both that despite the lip service they paid to normality or their laughter about suicide attempts, it lay at the bottom of their bellies with the inevitability of a sleepy drummer.

and I see now we store him up
year after year
old suicides.

It grows in our blood. We fight it because the world tells us we have to. Then truth overwhelms and we surrender. We lie down to be covered in shells and bones and silence.

I look out with scorching eyes to see you living - it's not real, you see? I am not real. I became a ghost because you looked and saw I was not there.

As for me, I am a watercolour.
I wash off.

Another sip of Cape Mentelle, the blood of grapes flowing down my throat as my wrist empties into the bath... my life into forgiving water.

They are eating each other
They are overfed.
At night alone I marry my bed.