The bullet that killed the poet was not beautiful. It did not make an exciting noise. And when it had hit him, he was dead, just like anyone else. It turns out poems don't count for much, and the bullet kills the poet as efficiently as it does the artist, the lover, the father or any other part of this whole mess of humanity. As the poet lay dying, he was not beautiful or tragic. He was not some bronzed youth mangled by a bronze spear. The simple fact of the matter was that he was a man who was shortly to become something quite different. Obviously, this came as something of a shock to him. But change is never easy.
The bullet that killed the poet was a work of mass production. Humanity's genius turned in on itself, all the expertise needed to design it, fabricate it, come up with the processes to repeat that manufacture twice, three times, a hundred, a million. The hand on the trigger, and the skill to make a shot fly true. If we accept that a glass of wine contains the entire universe, then the same must also be true for gunshot wounds.
The bullet that killed the poet was made by people ten thousand miles away. People who would never have to see his face, or hear the shot, or see the blood. Possibly they were troubled by it, but to the poet, I don't believe it mattered much.
The bullet that killed the poet, my best attempts notwithstanding, was not any sort of an allegory. You can project onto it whatever you wish, but the empirical reality remains. It did not hit him like a similie. His death was not a metaphor. It was a simple matter of fact and circumstance.
The bullet that killed the poet was not unfair. You might describe the circumstances thusly, but a bullet knows no better. It performed just as intended, and the metal shards tore into flesh and bone precisely in the manner they were designed to.
A tragedy?
Perhaps. But I had to do something. Because really, if a poet can't get something as simple as alexandrines right, what else is there to do but shoot him?
Ferrous Speed-Run. 2/20. 2 hours and 28 minutes.