Hunter S Thompson held hands with death
The bony fingers wrapped over his own
Resting on the trigger of a gun pressed to his head
Bang: blood went everywhere
Found by his son with dead eyes and cold to the touch

Sylvia Plath laid her head on deaths lap
Inside of an oven with the gas turned on
She took deep breaths and starved for oxygen
Carbon monoxide filled her lungs
Found by a nurse with blue lips and a still chest

David Foster Wallace reached up to kiss the lips of death
A rope worn as a necklace
He let his body hang as his face turned blue
Found on his patio with a broken neck and a broken heart

I too am a writer and they are scared for me to reach for death
I long for their embrace as a razor across my wrists
Writers are always torn apart trying to be too many people at once
So let them find me without a spark of life or an ounce of blood left inside

She might laugh if she read this
at the flat little version of her
that lives in my mind.
She may laugh
at my comparison of her
to a hideous sea spider
but hear me out
it could be touching.

David Foster Wallace wrote:
“Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience
we do not have direct access
to anyone or anything’s pain but our own;
and even just the principles
by which we can infer that others experience pain
and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain
involve hard-core philosophy—
metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics.”

"[Lobsters] do have an exquisite tactile sense,
one facilitated by hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs
that protrude through their carapace.
Although encased
in what seems a solid, impenetrable armour,
the lobster can receive stimuli and impressions from without
as readily as if it possessed a soft and delicate skin.”

and so

“We lift lobsters out of the bag
or whatever retail container they came home in
…whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen.
However stuporous the lobster is from the trip home, for instance,
it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water."

As much as I cannot comprehend the pain
of the exquisitely tactile lobster
in a *** of boiling water,
I wonder if I could
walk a mile in a lobster’s 8 minuscule shoes
and I wonder
what it might mean or not mean to her
with her armoured yet acute exoskeleton
to be back at home with her father.

They might try to butter you up
or snap elastic bands
around your oversized claws
and use a wooden spoon
to try and nudge your thrashing, clinging arms
back into the ***,
but remember:
lobsters can live to be over 100 years old
and grow to over 20 pounds in size
which is very large for an aquatic insect
and remember that they are marine crustaceans of the family Homaridae, characterized by five pairs of jointed legs, the first pair terminating in large pincerish claws.

And DFW famously said,

“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”

and he's not a lobster either