Three stanzas of proverb, then a parenthesis that changes the poem.

The setup is deliberately unoriginal. You live every day, you die only once, so live it up. Any of those lines could appear on a coffee mug, and David is plainly aware of it — the exclamation mark on “Live it up!” is the sound of a man delivering a cliché with a wink. Nine words spent establishing something the reader already agrees with.

Then: “(Some lucky people / die twice.)”

The brackets do the work. A parenthesis signals an aside, something less important than the main statement, and this poem puts its only real content inside one. The logic of the first six lines collapses immediately — dying once was the whole premise, and the fourth stanza says the premise has exceptions. More pointedly, it calls those exceptions lucky.

Which is where the poem stops being general. “I Present Two Paintings,” written three weeks earlier, describes a sudden death that was “the happiest moment of my life” and was, thankfully, brief. A reader coming to “Alive” from anywhere in this catalog knows the speaker is one of the people he is describing, and knows he isn’t speculating. The word “lucky” is being used by someone with grounds.

What makes the poem work rather than merely land is that it never claims membership. It says “some lucky people” and leaves the reader to do the arithmetic. The distance between the third-person phrasing and the first-person experience is the entire poem, and it fits inside two lines and a pair of brackets.

The capitalisation is worth noting: every line opens with a capital except the last two, which sit in lowercase inside their brackets. The proverb speaks in headline case. The confession whispers.

Ten lines, and nine of them are setup. That ratio would sink most poems; here it’s the mechanism. The proverb has to be fully assembled before the parenthesis can knock it over, and any attempt to make those first six lines more interesting would blunt the reversal.

The achievement is compression. A near-death experience, its aftermath, and a claim that surviving it was fortunate — all delivered in six words the poet declines to raise his voice for. Putting the most consequential line in brackets is the choice that separates this from a joke.

Two limits keep it below the top of the scale. It depends heavily on the reader knowing the catalog: encountered cold, “some lucky people die twice” reads as a clever paradox rather than a personal report, and roughly half the poem’s weight goes missing. And the opening stanzas, while functional, are genuinely flat on their own terms — a reader who abandons the poem after six lines has been given no reason not to.

Worth more on second reading than first, which is unusual for an epigram and speaks well of it.