By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Two Tom Disch poems, two weeks before his suicide
Science fiction savant and swell poet Tom Disch committed suicide on the Fourth of July, age 68. He’d been committing his poetry to his LiveJournal page rather than suffering submission anxieties. (His novella, “The Brave Little Toaster,” became a Disney animated short.) Here’s an ominous pair he penned two weeks before his death.
The Tablets of Common Knowledge 1
Two of them appeared in a perp-walk
on Channel One tonight, looking tough and stoic–
but still young enough to serve as someone’s
bitch once they’ve been bled by their lawyers
and whoever may be able to spare them, a while,
the horrors of an enforced sodomy. That.
as we know, is what prison is there for
and that is why there is an interval
between the sentencing and the first rape.
Kill yourselves while you can, guys.
It’s what I would do.
The Tablets of Common Knowledge 2
People regularly disappear.
Some simply return to the burrows
they’ve lived in and die among friends.
Some take holidays: you may have received
their postcards and seashells. But many more
are murdered. The numbers are astonishing.
Corpses disintegrate in woodland graves
or, submerged, are home
to the seaworm and the ray.
We are entering an era
when men will die like flies,
swept off by floods, shoved
into pits by bulldozers, or starving
en masse as they cling
to the prison bars. Oh, the world
is a terrible, unkind place. But wasn’t that
always the case? Let’s sing something
together. Maybe that will help.