Deaden your nerves, steel your eyes, Let this apathy be your guise You know what is right But you haven’t the might, So let all, fall, Into its own night. Have not a care, Be not aware Let them borrow your despair
I haven’t the strength To be the change I’d like to see I have only just enough To simply just be me These shoulders were not made to bear All the burdens of the earth Only room for my own trials Ordained from my birth It might be selfish But it has to be this way Otherwise I’d crumble Or else be spirited away
I don’t want to put off living And I don’t want to put off experience I want to have everything life can give me Be everything I can be And I’m real sorry you don’t know the difference Between being alive and simply existing Hide these thoughts behind worthless rhymes They say a coward dies many times So you keep your eyes straight ahead I want to die only when I’m dead
Emerson and Fuller, Thoreau and Whitman, Again and again, it has been written: Nothing ever ends, death is no Impasse; So when you’re gone we’ll look for you, In our Leaves Of Grass.