when the world is a stone in my mouth I can neither spit out or swallow suicide is not an option when I'm so full of nothing I float over myself like a cloud suicide is not an option when I shiver with sadness or howl with grief suicide is not an option when men and women with cracked eyes and broken smiles ravenously track my passage begging me for pennies I have begged from someone else suicide is not an option when I stare out the window at the same old view a little smaller each day suicide is not an option when liquor doesn't fix it and drugs are too ugly and money is a god I must worship but cannot believe in suicide is not an option when the telephone ringing is a knife at my back when I'm so full of rage my teeth chatter so faithless I refuse to open my eyes for days at a time suicide is not an option when I fall on my face in the dirt and cry for everything I cannot hold and everything I cannot be and everything I can't do without I know that suicide is not an option suicide is not an option suicide is not an option not while I still can stand
You can find David Lerner’s hard-hitting published works at Zeitgeist Press.
Pardon me for directly quoting a portion of the Zeitgeist Press write-up on him, but it's so important and screams to be shared:
"In his own life (1951-1997), Lerner, sacrificed all for his dream. Tall, 6’4″, with a gut and big hair, Lerner was both flint and steel for the flame which consumed him. He was all contradiction, child and monster, bombast and buddy, prince and beggar, he wanted, he once said, to carry himself like the king of a ruined but noble nation. Early on, when I met him, he had thrown over a book advance, resulting from syndicated articles, to pursue his poetry. He’d also given up a moderately successful journalism career because it interfered with the poetry. As his economic situation became more desperate, he became even more committed to the poetry, to his plans for changing the world. It would be easy to say that this was madness, and indeed there were times when he harvested his own biochemical imbalance like a spring lamb laid on the altar of art. But to know and love David, as I did, was to understand that this was his choice for life, as well as death. He didn’t court ruin, but who he was, and chose to be, placed him in the grips of a dream merciful as a hangman’s noose. He lived and died entirely devoted to that dream. When has the world made room for such a one?
"As a friend, Lerner could be impossible to handle. But he also saw and honored the most fragile part in each of us. He only knew how to love absolutely, and love he did, forthrightly, desperately, with quiet fury and an unmatched private intensity. His wife, Maura O’Connor, in a poem, once described “His Heart and All the Messy Places He Put It.” There was no tragic intent. He wanted to live. He wanted to flourish. He wanted inconsolably to bring the dream of poetry to a people that couldn’t yet see it. But he lived with poverty and drugs, incarceration and madness. But David Lerner is not so easily dismissed by his worst self. He is entitled, as any poet, to be judged by his best. And his best is exceedingly good: funny, perceptive, endlessly appreciative of beauty, he made a faith of the pure truth of feeling. His images shine with instant, intuitive recognition. The mission of poetry, he once said, is to “drive a cherry-red Mercedes Benz into the heart of hell and place a bet on God.”
"This he did, and he relied on us, today, readers and friends, to carry that bet this last mile. It is here, in this book, his bet on “the red, white and blue, its measureless promise boiled down to a dollar, for women who’ve never been touched, and for men who don’t know how…” For David Lerner, poetry meant everything. His was a rave for beauty, a scream for sanity, a mad laughing monologue to convince us to honor the eternal in our selves. Are you listening?
-Bruce Isaacson, Las Vegas, Nevada"
Sadly David Lerner died of a drug overdose in 1997, so that could well be seen as form of suicide, despite this poems emphatic rejection of the many valid reasons he saw for pursuing such an option. He was clearly talented and is a truly great loss to poetry.