Tuesday, April 12, 2011

The List of Unusual Deaths.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_deaths

I like the impressive suicides, the ones in which
you can really tell they meant it. The man
in Australia, 1995, who did it with a shotgun:
once to the chest, walked 15 meters, once
to the face, tearing away his throat and his jaw,
walked 136 meters and lay down on the slope
of a hill. With both hands he held the barrel
to his heart and pulled the trigger
with his toes. The man on death row, 1930,
who knew about the nitrocellulose in the red ink
on playing cards and so, stuffed his cot leg with them,
blowing himself up, as if to say, even in death
you have no power over me. Delicious. I like

the modern deaths, not necessarily the ones
that happened recently, but the ones
that could not have happened without technology,
the man in Texas in 2003 stepping onto
an elevator, decapitated, just like that,
the man blissfully jogging on the beach, 2010,
who didn't hear the airplane making
an emergency landing over the sound
of his iPod, and also in 2010, the owner
of the Segway company who drove his Segway
off a cliff, accidentally, and drowned.

...blah blah blah maybe there's more to this poem
when I revise in May but for now I'm damn tired.
My back has been hurting severely since Friday morning
(which makes this Day 5 of Crazy Chronic Back Pain
Spazstravaganza '11, and yes, I've been counting)
and it's time for my damned nap. Love you.

1 comment:

Nance said...

Went to hear David Sedaris read tonight. He talked of "recreational suicide" which made me giggle because of all the people that the event may or may not piss off! And the literature that would go unread if authors continue to publish good shit after you're gone.