Writers Writing Dying

C. K. Williams

Many I could name but won't who'd have been furious to die while they were

sleeping but did—

outrageous（粗暴的）, they'd have lamented（哀悼）, and never forgiven the death they'd con-

strued for themselves

being stolen from them so rudely, so crudely, without feeling themselves like

rubber gloves

stickily stripped from the innermostness they'd contrived to hoard（贮藏） for so

long—all of it gone,

squandered（浪费）, wasted, on what? Death, crashingly boring as long as you're able

to think and write it.

Think, write, write, think: just keep running faster and you won't even notice

you're dead.

The hard thing's when you're not thinking or writing and as far as you know

you are dead

or might as well be, with no word for yourself, just that suction-shush like a

heart pump or straw

in a milk shake and death which once wanted only to be sung back to sleep

with its tired old fangs

has me in its mouth!—and where the hell are you that chunk of dying we used

to call Muse?

Well, dead or not, at least there was that fancy, of some scribbler（三流作家，小文人）, some think-

and-write person,

maybe it was yourself, soaring in the sidereal void, and not only that, you were

holding a banjo

and gleefully strumming, and singing, jaw swung a bit under and off to the

side the way crazily

happily people will do it—singing songs or not even songs, just lolly-molly

syllable sounds

and you'd escaped even from language, from having to gab, from having to

write down the idiot gab.

But in the meantime isn't this what it is to be dead, with that Emily-fly

buzzing over your snout（鼻子）

that you're singing almost as she did; so what matter if you died in your sleep

or rushed towards dying

like the Sylvia-Hart part of the tribe who ceased too quickly to be and left out

some stanzas（演出期）?

You're still aloft with your banjoless banjo, and if you're dead or asleep who

really cares?

Such fun to wake up though! Such fun too if you don't! Keep dying! Keep

writing it down!