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Unknown Suicidal Female Perspective
The Riverside Desktop Poem’s headline “Sick of living / unwilling to die”, expresses the author’s great unhappiness with her life, possibly to an extent where she does not consider it worth living anymore. However, her will to live is stronger and she is not prepared to die.
While she is not ready to commit the final act, she fantasizes her death through suicide in a rather violent way, as expressed in the first half of the poem in lines 1-12.
As the lines 1-4 “cut. clean. if red / clean” suggest, her preferred way of suicide is through self-infliction of a clean cut or clean cuts, possibly with a knife or knife-like instrument. As she describes in lines 5-9 “blood spurting, dripping, spilling all over her new dress”, she cuts herself to an extent that involves heavy bleeding all over her imaginary or recently purchased new red dress that she is wearing in her suicide fantasy.
The rather extreme way of killing herself and the sarcastic remark “oh well it was read anyway” of lines 10-12 suggests that the author possibly feels strong self-hatred.
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Source: Wikipedia.org
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Furthermore, in line 8 and the entire rest of the poem, she speaks about herself in the third person, suggesting that she is viewing and reviewing her life from a de-personalized, judging, and condemnatory perspective of another person.
In the lines 13-14 “life draining into an uncertain death” the author anticipates the process and experience of dying and her uncertainty about the spiritual continuation of her existence after physical death.
After the line 1-14 have been a quite dramatic description of a suicide fantasy, lines 15-16 “she won’t die” and lines 17-18 “somebody ll find her” describe a sudden turn. Even in her fantasy, the author is not ready to commit the final act of suicide. Instead, she transforms her suicide fantasy to the fantasy of an unsuccessful suicide attempt, suggesting that the author’s actual intention is a call for help, care and attention. However, in the final line of the poem she reserves the option to repeat her fantasized suicide attempt another time with a possibly different outcome.
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