Dorothea Lasky / Thom Donovan
from Deadpan

 

I am angry at you, Death

 

Death, I have been angry at you

For such a long time

And I still am

So angry at you

For giving me too many things to take myself away from

Hollow out the time of them for the sake of it

Metal bowls I leave the fruit in, but they change eventually

I don’t want to ever not change, but I want something constant

Like the ocean

I don’t want the ocean to ever die

And yet, you steal the saltwater from it as a lark

You take the seabirds from it one by one

As you glance at them casually, a party

Of seabirds raining down

My breath labored

At the light of all my birds

Raining down on the ocean.

You know, one day, I will kill you

Before you have a chance to

Do anything anymore to the people I love

Leaving them awry in the summer sun

Or bloody on the pulpit

Leaving all the people I love bloody on the pulpit

And raining down with things I cannot contain

I cannot contain you but I will kill you

So swiftly one day in the morning

I will enter a room and there will be so much

Folding of the Spring that I have created and made

My life into it will be like you are dead once and for all

How will you feel to be dead once and for all?

All of it happening to you like you have no empathy

I don’t think it is that you have no empathy

But moreso that you are so wild

You cannot stop to consider our feelings

On the day I will kill you I will be so wild

That I will not have a civilized moment to consider your feelings

I will act upon you in a reddish smoky haze

Because I am more powerful than you ever gave me credit for

My limits exceed that of other men before me

And I have prepared for this strike

My whole life

And when the time is upon us

I will do the thing I have set out to do for this humanity

As you creak under me into the earth

A groaning, lepered thing

A fallen thing we will all learn to forget forever