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!