#dead poems

Partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian

partly because of my love for you,

partly because of your love for yoghurt

partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches

partly because of the secrecy our smiles

take on before people and statuary.

—Frank O'Hara, Having A Coke With You.

Like two doomed ships that pass in storm

We had crossed each other’s way:

But we made no sign, we said no word,

We had no word to say;

—Oscar Wilde, The Ballad Of Reading Gaol.

And, though I was a soul in pain,

My pain I could not feel.

Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

His brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then - that he could not feel.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

I’m not suicidal, I just romanticise my death. ‍♀️