Many of the stanzas in Lloyd Addison's untitled poem open with an order about a grave, yet the speaker spends most of the poem arguing about how to go on living. The opening refrain, "O bury me not in…", seems to echo the old cowboy lament "O Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie". But the places the speaker refuses are not graveyards. They are "the little room, like a worm in a one-by-one", "long unrequited dreams", "the margins of identity, voiceless & meaningless", and a place "behind the veil of pride, under vanity's shawl". Burial here means being shut into smallness while still alive. Even the "madding birds" feel like a twist on "far from the madding crowd": the noise left outside is nature's, not society's.
The middle of the poem is its bleakest stretch, and the form shows why. Three questions ("Are all the days the same in December… at noon… in the night") are answered by flat repeated statements: "All the days are the same in never stopping", "to wake up hope-short", "day-over-day hobo wardrobes". There is almost no rhyme, so the sameness comes from anaphora, the same opening words returning like days. The imagery turns domestic and slumped. Day is "spread / all over the bed, all over the bedroom, / all over the bath, hot & cold to run", as if the hours were laundry nobody has put away. The slip from "days" to "nays" may be a typo or a pun, but either way it lets a refusal leak into the routine.
Then the poem turns on one phrase: "All the days are the same in timelessness." Sameness, which was a trap, becomes something close to eternity. What follows is the poem's most honest moment: "I can't stop wanting to live / I can't stop wanting to die / I can't stop wanting to love." The grammar is compulsion, with no choosing among the three. A few lines later the same construction brightens into "I can't wait to write another song", and "can't stop" becomes "can't wait". The speaker is still driven, but now toward the future.
The burial instructions change with it. The speaker no longer refuses a grave but designs one: "Bury me dead before I awaken", "in the wind by the sea", "at night in an unknown place, journeying blindfolded, / at that world's edge, scatter me". The strangest instruction is "and go away from that time & place / until they bury you". The mourner is told to leave and reminded, almost drily, that they will be buried too. Death stops being private and becomes something everyone shares.
The language is rough on purpose. Words like "stopdown" and "beauti-force" are coined, the ampersands keep the lines fast, and the opening stutters ("in:in") like someone starting a sentence twice. A phrase such as "in the field response, O sands of years" resists easy paraphrase, and a reader should admit that. It reads like speech under pressure, with no time to smooth the syntax.
The ending moves from refusal to promise. "I will write of you in the clouds / on the waves / in the leaves, over fields, / from hilltops & rooftops, thru-out all hearts." The "you" is never named. It could be a lover, a reader, or the world itself, and the openness helps, because the speaker's presence can go anywhere. Even the pun in "everywhere it will, and still" works two ways: the spirit persists, and it is at rest. The last line, "O songs of dying me, be silent: Let my love be loved again", tells the poem's own death-songs to stop.
That is where its interest lies. Most poems about burial are elegies written by the living. Here the speaker writes the funeral instructions and uses them to refuse despair, repetition and invisibility. The only afterlife on offer is the poem itself, being sung, read and met "among songs again". The speaker does not claim to have solved the wish to live and the wish to die. The poem simply keeps writing past them.