title and content of ballad of the bangkok novotel [lyric] may refer to the poem 'the ballad of the lonely masturbator' by american poet anne sexton, published in her 1969 book 'love poems'.sexton was born as Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1928. She attended Garland Junior College for one year and married Alfred Muller Sexton II at age nineteen. She enrolled in a modeling course at the Hart Agency and lived in San Francisco and Baltimore. In 1953 she gave birth to a daughter. sexton was encouraged by her doctor to pursue an interest in writing poetry she had developed in high school, and in the fall of 1957 she enrolled in a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. In 1954 she was diagnosed with postpartum depression, suffered her first mental breakdown, and was admitted to Westwood Lodge, a neuropsychiatric hospital she would repeatedly return to for help. In 1955, following the birth of her second daughter, Sexton suffered another breakdown and was hospitalized again; her children were sent to live with her husband's parents. In 1974 at the age of 46, despite a successful writing career - she won the pulitzer prize for poetry in 1967 for 'Live or Die' - she lost her battle with mental illness and committed suicide.

Like Robert Lowell, sylvia plath, W. D. Snodgrass and other 'confessional' poets, Sexton offers the reader an intimate view of the emotional anguish that characterized her life. She made the experience of being a woman a central issue in her poetry, and though she endured criticism for bringing subjects such as menstruation, abortion, and drug addiction into her work, her skill as a poet transcended the controversy over her subject matter. [many thanks to jen for providing this information].a part of this poem is as follows:

The end of the affair is always death.
She's my workshop. Slippery eye,
out of the tribe of myself my breath
finds you gone. I horrify
those who stand by. I am fed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Finger to finger, now she's mine.
She's not too far. She's my encounter.
I beat her like a bell. I recline
in the bower where you used to mount her.
You borrowed me on the flowered spread.
At night, alone, I marry the bed. [...]

BALLAD OF THE BANGKOK NOVOTEL is about nicky wire's stay in a novotel in bangkok. he could not get outside because of the heat and he was afraid the police would arrest him for playing the anti-establishment song repeat.