Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.

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

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

I woke to the sound of rain.

My mother smiled. 'I knew my baby wasn't like that.'I looked at her. 'Like what?'Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital.' She paused. 'I knew you'd decide to be all right again.

Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.