Life, as we know it,
Isn't worth the effort.
So why do we bother?
Why do we get up in the morning?
Why do we go to work?
Pick up the phone and talk to mother?
We are creatures of habit,
And those habits are formed
In the resistance against oblivion.
We subject ourselves
To the rigours of daily life
In order to out run it.
We try to stay one step ahead,
One heartbeat in front,
One hair's breadth from death.
We'll do anything to avoid
Plummeting into the void,
Into untaught doom.
For what would death bring us?
Would we be in a paradise
Or condemned to eternal hell?
Maybe all we get do
Is choose between
Purgatory or the Fire.
Become an aimless, listless spirit,
Willowing in formless mist
Trying to figure out what went wrong.
Or burn in the oily slicks
Of the abyss, bubbling
And melting interminably.
I'll stick, thanks...
I'll hang out hard
And take the pain of life
Over the nothingness of death.
Pain I suffer now is nothing
To the torture of the unknown.
So, I, like the rest of us,
Suffer onward through the gloom of life
Feeling my way down the edges.
I'll shuffle reluctantly to death.
I'll take living in pain
To the pain in the absence of living.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Russian composer, died on this day in 1893.
Sally Field, American actress, was born today in 1946.
Poetry 365 