Blowflies
Existence gets away from us, short-shrifts us, blows us off,
When we've been led to believe, unequivocally,
That modern techno-medicine can keep us breathing indefinitely.
Somewhere deep within the bowels of this ironic disconnect
Lies a dynamically philosophic explanation
As to why humankind hasn't yet mastered immortality.
Could it be that none of us short-shrifteds deserves eternity,
By virtue of our hubristic deficiency of faith
In a being greater than us, who shapes the dictates of creation?
Or might our relatively brief histories, comedies, tragedies, farces
Play out because nothing we do to persuade destiny
That we deserve commutation, clemency, for our trespasses
Is sufficiently persuasive to make fate reconsider our sentence,
Let us off the hook, in the subarctic meat freezers
Located millennial miles below Tartarus, Hades, Sheol?
Wouldn't you think, after all those single-celled amebas, protozoans,
Cave-dwelling primates parading as highly civilized human beings
Who preceded us, in the ageless evolution of planetary species,
That we'd have micro-mastered the art of perpetual prolongation,
Learned how to fake belief in God's brightly burning eternal flame,
Which would ensure our salvific perpetuity, timelessness?
Yet, here we are, dying like lowly blowflies, right and left,
Despite all of Dr. Mortimer Feelgod's elixirs, nostrums, potions,
Still groping for an escape hatch from death's space station,
Not realizing the truth of how infinitely good we've got it.
Imagine having to live forever, mindless, deaf, blind, incontinent,
Wondering why we just can't die, with the dignity of a blowfly.
01/16/12
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