Résumé Razors pain you, Rivers are damp, Acids stain you, And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful, Nooses give, Gas smells awful. You might as well live.

Dorothy Parker’s quatrain is her famously mordant, epigrammatic take on suicide, written in the voice of a speaker who briskly inventories common methods and dismisses each as unpleasant or impractical. It reflects Parker’s broader 1920s–1930s persona as a New York wit associated with the Algonquin Round Table and her frequent use of dark humor to treat taboo subjects. The poem circulated widely as a standalone piece and is often quoted as an example of Parker’s ability to compress social commentary and emotional ambivalence into a few rhymed lines.

The poem’s joke is built on anticlimax: after listing lethal options, the speaker concludes that living is the least objectionable choice. The jaunty meter and sing-song rhymes clash with the grim topic, turning despair into a kind of comic consumer report on self-destruction. That tonal dissonance is the point: Parker exposes how language can domesticate horror, while also suggesting a stubborn, pragmatic will to endure. The final line—“You might as well live”—reads as both a shrug and a hard-won counsel, implying that even when life feels unbearable, death offers no clean, dignified escape.

1) “Razors pain you; / Rivers are damp; / Acids stain you; / And drugs cause cramp.”
2) “Guns aren’t lawful; / Nooses give; / Gas smells awful; / You might as well live.”