Pretend You're Dead

Photo by Vijendra Singh on Unsplash

Do any of you get the weekly newsletter from Austin Kleon? I’ve been getting his newsletter for several years now. Sometimes I even read it. Today’s breath was inspired by the latest edition. It’s an SFD that wants to be two or three different poems, but they all came out together for now.

Austin Kleon said: Pretend you're dead.

This is how you finish a book.

Pretend you're dead and find the book in a trunk you left behind,

like Emily Dickinson's hand-stitched books of poetry.

If I am to pretend this, then I must also pretend

my evolution has stopped.

What is left is opinion and conjecture about what I wrote,

who I was.

Words on paper and words on screen and

words in the belly of so many whales --

If whales are dreams who swallow all the ideas I had at the edge of sleep,

that were gone by the time I woke up.

Words that some someone who comes after me

will organize into tidy little piles --

spiritual, fiction, personal, other --

And maybe a pile that never sees the light of day --

a sigh of relief from the people who feared

that all I wrote was about them

even as they step into the place after death

to claim influence over my life.