Don't try suicide! (3 ripostes to my last post)

Or 4, if you count this post-title - which is in fact a song from Queen's excellent 1980 album 'The Game'.

I've quoted quite a lot of G. K. Chesterton recently, and here's some more - from another of his well-known doggerel verses, 'A Ballade of Suicide'.

The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall;
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours - on the wall -
Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"
The strangest whim has seized me. . . . After all,
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

Well, that's only the first verse. It does go on a bit (he was writing to fill space in newspapers and magazines; and quite possibly, I suspect, getting paid by the word - a dangerous, seductive vice!), and some of the later observations are a bit dated. However, there is an exquisitely beautiful couplet in the last verse, on one of the consolations that turns us aside from the path of suicide:

And through thick woods one finds a stream astray,
So secret that the very sky seems small...


Then there's this (bleaker, more pragmatic), by Dorothy Parker:


Resumé

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.


And finally, this marvellously warped 'love song' of the frustrated suicide - by Tom Waits, from his superb 1992 album 'Bone Machine':


The Ocean Doesn't Want Me

The ocean doesn't want me today
But I'll be back tomorrow to play
And the strangels will take me
Down deep in their brine
The mischievous braingels
Down into the endless blue wine
I'll open my head and let out
All of my time
I'd love to go drowning
And to stay and to stay
But the ocean doesn't want me today
I'll go in up to here
It can't possibly hurt
And all they will find is my beer
And my shirt
A rip tide is raging
And the lifeguard is away
But the ocean doesn't want me today
The ocean doesn't want me today