You Might As Well Live (Dorothy Parker)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You reviewed the Yale prom
for Vanity Fair
and wrote: if all the girls attending
were laid end to end
I wouldn't be at all surprised
and they fired you
and the firing
was the best thing
that ever happened to American wit
because it freed you
from the obligation
of being polite
to people
who did not deserve
the effort politeness requires

[Verse 2]
The Algonquin Round Table —
you and Benchley and Kaufman
and the rest of them
drinking lunch into dinner
and dinner into the kind of morning
that only works
if everyone at the table
is funnier than everyone
not at the table
You were the funniest
and the saddest
which is a combination
the English language
has never been able to separate
and you did not try —
you served them together
like gin and vermouth
and let the ratio
speak for itself

[Chorus]
Razors pain you,
rivers are damp,
acids stain you,
drugs cause cramp —
guns aren't lawful,
nooses give,
gas smells awful —
you might as well live
You wrote the poem
as a joke
and the joke
was the truest thing you ever published
and the truest thing
was also the saddest thing
and the saddest thing
rhymed perfectly
because despair
in your hands
was never permitted
to be sloppy

[Verse 3]
You wrote screenplays in Hollywood
and hated every minute
except the paycheck
which you spent
on causes and drinks
in that order on good days
and the reverse on the others
You left your estate
to Martin Luther King Jr.
and when he died
it went to the NAACP
because even your will
had a contingency plan
and the contingency plan
had politics

[Bridge]
You tried to die
more than once
and the trying
did not take
and you kept writing
the way a person
keeps breathing
after they've decided
to stop:
the body overrules the decision
and the body
in your case
produced sentences
so sharp
they were practically a reason
to stay

[Outro]
You died at seventy-three
in a hotel room
in Manhattan
with a dog
and no family
and a body of work
so compressed
that every line
carries the weight
of the novel
you never wrote
because the novel
would have required
being sincere
for three hundred pages
and you could only
be sincere
for the length
of a martini
which was enough —
it was more than enough —
it was exactly
the right amount