Death As a Way of Life
Arguably, admittedly, I have an obsession with death.
OK, now it's finally out.
So much for "don't ask, don't tell." The truth is moot.
You could, conceivably, classify my fascination as a fixation,
A perverse preoccupation with demise, if you choose.
I suggest you see it as a rite of passage
Old age undertakes, of its own volition,
By virtue of living long enough to be able to look back
Without flinching, suffering panic attacks,
As a diehard acrophobiac might be able to look down
While walking a steel girder of a skyscraper
Reaching its eighty-fifth story, above Manhattan,
Asking himself what possibly possessed him
To step out on life's unforgiving edge,
On a lark, a whim, daring death to blow him off...
Undertakes when the end of life is a given,
A foregone conclusion to a nonrecurring delusion,
An immutable testament to mutability, decease, decay.
I myself, as a voice of one, at most or at least,
Decline to accept the end of me, anyway,
If not Faulknerian man, humanity at large, the planet —
Indeed I do. I will not only endure and prevail
Because I have a puny, inexhaustible voice
But because I have a spirit, a soul, capable of chutzpah,
A Diasporan capacity to rise above tsuris,
Anti-Semitic, Hitlerian, Übermenschen hubris
That would consign my pariah's heritage to the ovens,
My faculty for compassion, pity, sacrifice, endurance
To Madjanek, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau-Buna —
Indeed, I will. I'm immortal.
So, naturally, you ask about my obsession with death.
What more can I say? I'll tell you.
I worship it.
Since oppression is all I've ever known,
I find that death is an abiding, comforting presence.
How otherwise could I endure life's infinite atrocities?
07/28/08 - (2)
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