I.
The question you will never ask your mother is nothing special. She points out how like the animals we (you) are
But she doesn’t care how we (you) got that way. She never will. We (She) laughs, for what is it to her as long as you don’t leave a suicide note?
and when there’s nothing left But the epitaph, will it be devoid of any emotion? Few of us love, yet many die out in the open; perhaps there will be no epitaph.
And when you (I) say thesis, I (you) say antithesis,
But we don’t love, and thus stop there: we take our little fourteen-day vacations to wait for the slumber of opposing ideas,
Plant mandrakes in the skiing snow, snip them on opposing cliffs and then build a case for demolishing the footbridge.
Between the two of us, I cried about them, I hate to be seemingly flimsy yet sturdy enough in fact
To support a battalion of filial duties. that forest is Hidden behind trees, we watch not listen as they burst our eardrums.
I dream that I lie awake in the ground and The soldiers march across it, single file, too scared to touch my epitaph.
because To look down would mean they need to read the cutfruit love my mother left me. We cheer the general who leads them all, all except the boy who refuses to listen.
In the fairy tale the prince who knew no fear always dies to my mother. for Him we ask no pity.
He laughs thinking he is open-eyed, and prides himself for being ready to die as we were not.
He is not one of us, nor is he all right, but left behind to be better, stronger, stranger.
He asks for an epitaph more out of fear than anything else, for anyone can bear a cross but only the stone can bear his memory.
Jaeho — I love you and I love this poem. You've turned something that was already one of my favorite pieces of all time into a work of art that is painfully relatable. <3 The little 14-day vacations or the "for what is it to her as long as you don't leave a suicide note?" hit hard.