Anne Sexton - The Breast lyrics

This is the key to it. This is the key to everything. Preciously. I am worse than the gamekeeper's children picking for dust and bread. Here I am drumming up perfume. Let me go down on your carpet, your straw mattress - whatever's at hand because the child in me is dying, dying. It is not that I am cattle to be eaten. It is not that I am some sort of street. But your hands found me like an architect. Jugful of milk! It was yours years ago when I lived in the valley of my bones, bones dumb in the swamp. Little playthings. A xylophone maybe with skin stretched over it awkwardly. Only later did it become something real. Later I measured my size against movie stars. I didn't measure up. Something between my shoulders was there. But never enough. Sure, there was a meadow, but no yound men singing the truth. Nothing to tell truth by. Ignorant of men I lay next to my sisters and rising out of the ashes I cried my s** will be transfixed! Now I am your mother, your daughter, your brand new thing - a snail, a nest. I am alive when your fingers are. I wear silk - the cover to uncover - because silk is what I want you to think of. But I dislike the cloth. It is too stern. So tell me anything but track me like a climber for here is the eye, here is the j**el, here is the excitement the nipple learns. I am unbalanced - but I am not mad with snow. I am mad the way young girls are mad, with an offering, an offering… I burn the way money burns.