Which is more unpleasant
an Americano without body
a meal without taste
an apple rotten to the core
a woman who’s never cried
a man afraid to try
a child you can’t distract
a secret smashed to smithereens
a dream turned sour
a faith unfounded
howls of slaughtered daisies
weeping willows in drought
the last gasp of an olive tree
a whale beached on barnacles
the last dodo dying in chains
an island of plastic reproducing
a dog that will not walk
a cat that cannot purr
an elephant on crutches
fifteen years of carbuncles
sixteen decades in a black hole
seventeen centuries without a change in the weather.
From Bath to Cork with baby Grace 
What a welcome & brilliant comment Gossamer Universe
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This provides a confounding cognitive dissonance as between my sense that I am not meant to choose and the impossibility of not weighing the options and choosing. I DO have an answer to this probably unanswerable question. It boils down to the whale and the Dodo for me – is the whale already dead? If so, I choose the Dodo, whose suffering is ongoing; if not, I yet choose the Dodo, whose suffering is ongoing, but whose manner of death is unnatural, so more difficult to accept. You see it’s as though the poem demands that I not answer even as the question demands that I do.
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