[OC] [FB] Exhortation

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Come, O Death, and make me not,  
As the Sun makes not the night.  
Spare not will, nor sense, nor thought;  
Obliterate the knowing light  

That pulls the strings that make it go  
In dismal jerks and frets and struts  
and sits behind to watch the show  
and hates the poppet's fucking guts.  

Hear, O Death, my solemn plea:  
dissolve the strange cruel chemistry  
That is an I that longs to be  
A nothing in eternity.
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poet OP

I want to make a documentary about a guitar player who lived hard and died young just so I can name it “Struts and Frets”.

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poet OP

I don’t set out to write sonnets, but I keep getting pulled in that direction. Three quatrains is a good length for a poem, I think. I also spent a lot of time trying to think of a good couplet to put at the end because I feel, for some absurd reason, that it “should” have a couplet, but I can’t think of one that fits the tone. Couplets just feel too cutesy and rhymey for a topic as super serious as the shuffling of the ole mortal coil.

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poet OP

It often is, but this poem isn’t about the kind of death that includes an afterlife. That’s just more life. This is an exhortation for nonexistence. I think that’s what makes the volta tricky, is that the speaker knows exactly what they’re asking for from the jump. Which I think is what makes it feel kind of like a prayer, the old school Catholic kind, not the non-denominational invocative freestyling where people just say whatever they want to god. When I was a kid we got all our prayers pre-written from the church, and those were the prayers we said. Feels… genre bending to have realizations in the middle of prayers, lol.

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