Living Like a Cripple

[rowens]

There are days when there is nothing to do anyway,
those are the ones that count.
All the others don't count.

If you were to try to account for anything important
it would come out wrong anyway,
there's no reason to try;

that's what you're doing, right?
Trying to try,
something pathetic.

The kind of thing that people either feel sorry for you about
or hate you for.
The kind of stuff that hurts in every way.

Now, you were friends before, with that guy,
the one that shot those kids in that school.
You understood each other well.

You even understood when he did that,
when he killed all those people;
and now you're ashamed you wimped out of admitting it,

that you had to go and try to be normal
like you do any time something is at stake,
something important.

It must be tough:
I'm telling you, because I understand you;
and I know you'd never do anything like that,

kill a lot of people.
But I wouldn't be surprised if you did;
I'm just letting you know.

If you're going to kill yourself,
you might as well take somebody with you,
take some people that people would actually miss.

Nobody would miss you, I wouldn't;
but if you took somebody I actually loved:
That would be different.

[ellajam]

I think this one is really strong. I like the mask of normalcy, what we think others will perceive as normal.

And the end, a sledgehammer.
"Nobody would miss you, I wouldn't;
but if you took somebody I actually loved:
That would be different."

The whole thing rang with a true tone for me, well done.

[Erthona]

You know, I see people killing themselves with booze, anorexia, et al. and I struggle with that. In a free society does a person have the right to destroy themselves. It's the struggle between right and responsibility, because in a free society we also have certain responsibilities. Out of 7 billion people there are going to be a few nut jobs, and a lot of the time you don't know they're nut jobs until they actually do what they say they are going to do. Up until then it was just a fantasy. The person playing along maybe never think it will go that far, and when it does they go into shock and can't act. The time to act would have been way before, but he's a kid, he doesn't know that. Not that much different from when adults see atrocities they don't stop. It's easy when you're on the outside looking in to say, "Why didn't you do something?" But most people, if put in he same situation, would do the exact same thing. I suppose it's sad, certainly it's sad for the parents of the children who were killed, but in someways it's just life. The government likes to posture and say they will do something to make sure this doesn't happen again, but it will. It's already been proven from the "war on terror" that if someone is willing to die to kill people, then people will die. Not much different from these last lines really:

"If you're going to kill yourself,
you might as well take somebody with you,
take some people that people would actually miss.
Nobody would miss you, I wouldn't;"

Dale

[rowens]

I feel a strong repulsion when it comes to death and murder and things like that. It must be some weird psychological thing. I like horror movies, but I don't like the parts where people get killed.

[ChristopherSea]

Chilling advice. The narrator is more sociopathic than the manic depressive.

[rowens]

That's how advice usually is. Have you ever had parents?

[ChristopherSea]

Yes, that is why I said, if that is straightforward advice given in those last two stanzas, the narrator is sociopathic. If reverse psychology is being employed, it could still backfire horribly. This ambiguity is what makes this a potent and poignant poem for me.