Next poem in tour: Next Poem In Tour - e.e. cummings - "We Love Each other Very Dearly"

Best-seller

            He was a friend I knew so well that sometimes I would almost wonder
            Which of us was which
            And its funny
            Considering myself the sort of thing I consider myself
            Trying to work out what I'm suited to or what kinds of abilities or fortunes I have
            How is it that we human beings can be that we don't know such things?
            Being a thinking being which thinking says has properties he does not himself understand
            Acts for reasons he does not himself realise
            Exists for a length of time largely out of his control 
            Without having chosen necessarily to exist at all
            And hardly ever having chosen to stop

            So its funny that we should respect dead people
            When we did not respect them while they were alive

            After all dead people aren't people
            They're just thoughts in the thinking of others
            A few scattered ashes and we act as though they still existed
            Almost better
            And maybe there's something in that
            Maybe they are better dead
            Now the play has finished we can consider the whole
            Pausing to prolong the anticipation of each climax 
            And the nothingness that follows like a question :
            How could that have been?
            Freed for a moment from the demands of holding back and thrusting forward
            Death throbs through him a few more times and spurts out his life
            Like some final orgasm

            He was walking down the road to fetch a newspaper
            As he always did at four in the afternoon
            A lamp post fell on him
            And he'd just started writing a novel which was kind of autobiographical
            And it might have been a bestseller