---
id:
aliases: []
tags:
  - authorship/original
  - destiny/uncertain
  - status/draft
  - type/media/poetry
  - topic/hobbies/poetry
title: when i die
changelog:
  2025-10-21: v1 draft and initial commentary
---
# when i die

## Version 1

```verse
when i die
don't put me in a box
to become an inch of human soup

when i die
don't burn my flesh to ash
and waste what i have left to give

when i die
leave me to rest on the forest floor
to feed the foxes and fungi

and when you return
to tell me how you've been
and how you meant to come back sooner

you'll find me there
a special piece that remained
waiting for your visit

this is my sincere request and express consent:
please make a xylophone from my ribcage
when i die
```

### Commentary

I wrote this at about 2025-10-21 04:00
when I couldn't sleep.

#### Theme

At the time I thought the poem was very funny:
it starts out morbid and death-negative,
then becomes touching,
then a sharp pivot to grotesque and absurd.

I think now though
there's something to the ribcage xylophone metaphor:

##### A Xylophone Made from My Ribcage

The quality (musical or otherwise)
of a xylophone made of one's bones
is independent of the quality of their character
or their worth as a person.

To desire for one's bones to be _made_ useful in such a manner,
in rejection of traditional memorial,
is to believe that commodity value of one's parts
exceeds the value of the damage treating them as such
would do to one's memory.

The speaker's request at first sounds like
they're letting the reader off easy:
"don't bother with burial or cremation,
just toss me in the woods",
but the convenience is negated by their second request,
a task that would be so ethically difficult
(not to mention technically difficult)
as to be impossible for almost all people.

To make the speaker's request
is to make it the responsibility of one's descendants
to make up for one's own failure to live a meaningful life,
and to do so while acting as if giving them a gift.

##### Obsession with Death

Repetition of "when i die",
use of dysphemism ("inch of human soup"),
and the lack of horror for their request,
suggests that the speaker is obsessed with death.

The speaker is likely not working to mitigate their regret
while they still have life to live.

### Notes for V2

Further express the speaker's ignorance and dismissal
of the difficulty of their requests.

```verse
when i die
==just== leave me to rest on the forest floor
to feed the foxes and fungi
```
