To live is to kill.
From the moment of our birth
We write our will,
And in it, see our less than worth:
To those we’ve left: we leave sorrow.
We would have left less tomorrow.
If the goal is smaller funeral lines,
Don’t die famous or young; no one pines
Old age leaving wealth—
The older you are, the less they care for your health.
The ones they desperately mourn
Are children recently born;
They hardly lived, and did not kill
In the way all living does—they leave grief in their will—
Grief that kills.
No song can explain this grief.
So little Shakespeare; so many wills.
As we live, the years
Kill us; more pain and less tears.
If the will we leave
Is generous, heirs do not grieve;
It matters what things
We inherit; each testament and will brings
Sorrow or greatness—
I did love you, but I grieved less
Because you lived and therefore killed.
Life is never empty, it is filled
With those we infected; our life
Took air and sun
And everything that’s precious from everyone.
Our life meant someone could not
Live, we came at the end of a plot
Conceived by death—
We breathed. Every breath
Was, for the world, another death.
We left the world noisier, we drove,
We spread germs, we wove
The sleeve of death for all to wear;
We chased down death in our outward care.
Let me read the will I left behind:
I leave a broken heart to those perceptive and kind,
Sighing thoughts for a sighing mind
And sorrow
To the sensitive who live tomorrow.