Eating the Dead

Lay you on my kitchen table Cut you open tenderly Eat your heart and eyes and mouth Every word you spoke to me Eat the day we swam at Whitney Eat the wind as cold as ice Eat the sun that warmed your skin Your soft hand that reached for mine Eat the coffee and the pancakes Eat the films and fucks in bed Eat the days the kids were born The day we found out Jean was dead Well okay, let-let's creep up on this a little bit, broach it carefully The first thing to say is when one does think Really get down to thinking about death, the place of death in our experience, the experience of life We notice that if it's right that death is nothing to us individually I'm not gonna experience my own death My own dying, yes, but not my own "being dead" Then that means that death, as I experience it is other peoples' death I experience death as grief and loss I experience it as the page in the interesting book which suddenly disappears And it's not longer there and the nostalgia, the lack, the loss, the sorrow It is what my experience is all about Eat the roaring, blazing rows Eat the never-ending hugs Eat the angry and the kindness Most importantly, your love Lay you on my kitchen table Cut you open tenderly Eat your heart and eyes and mouth Every word you spoke to me Lay you on my kitchen table Cut you open tenderly Eat your heart and eyes and mouth Every word you spoke to me So they, they, uh, they say to learn to die is to learn to philosophize That is, you get wisdom from the fact that you realize there is nothing to fear from death And therefore there is nothing to fear from anything And what you should concentrate therefore is on all the business of living Meditation of the wise person is a meditation on life not on death Because death is nothing to us