Death Is a Deliverer

Music: Fugue in F# major.
By Dimitri Shostakovich. Sequenced by J. Marques.

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Death is a deliverer
From fierce and pointless pain,
From drugged-out days and nauseous nights
One would not see again;

From life whose only passion is
To free itself from life,
Eternally anesthetized,
Numb to need or knife;

From desperate dependence
And gross indignity,
Lying in the cesspool
Of one's own shit and pee;

From being a non-person
Whose person is abused,
Dethroned from even one's own brain,
Perpetually confused.

Yet though one would no longer be,
The instinct is not gone:
The heart and mind are all for death;
The body lingers on.