Bath Poems

“Anne, I don’t want to live.. Now listen, life is lovely, but I can’t live it. I can’t even explain. I know how silly it sounds.. But if you knew how it felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that’s the rub. I am like a stone that lives… Locked outside of all that’s real… Anne, do you know of such things, can you hear? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet… And yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can’t, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong… To do it all wrong… Believe me, (can you?)… What’s wrong? I want to belong. I’m like a jew who ends up in the wrong country. I’m not a part. I’m not a member. I’m frozen.”