I hate death!
We all do — except the ones in so much pain they reach longingly for the deep-downed, dark-doored, dumb-doped end. And the one who kills, again, and thrills to it — scary-eyed, numb, weirdly mad, mad, mad.
And yet, short of that, we bumble down the straight path toward the end blithely ignoring the dark, grim, hooded, million-scythed, body-reaping hole of life.
And when it does come to our door, we weep bitterly over the loss of the one while remaining stupidly unmoved by the send-off of millions. In precisely this death-doped fashion we expose the colossal smallness and massive shortness of our empathetic reach.
And yet, thinking on it, on that unknown slam, bam and wham, who doesn’t blanch, lurch and fear a bit? We all know that lurking somewhere in life’s caked cracks, its splintered beaks, broken teeth and diseased gums creeps and spreads the end. On all clocks, hour glasses and sun dials vultures sit.
Life is scary; if it weren’t so, death wouldn’t make us so afraid.
And so we temporize, prop up, work out and go for looks. It doesn’t help. Facelifts, breast implants and wigs just make the corpses weirder.
But whatever we do, or don’t do, say or don’t say at the end, in ritual and ceremony, bent solemnly over the still bodies, there is no getting around this: On your mark, get set — die!
And yet — not.
Of all the forces of the earth, death is the most vanquished. Sunflowers, guppies, rabbits, lichens, lilies, oaks, bats, cockroaches — look how they beat death down.
Every time any living thing dies, after having reproduced itself, death loses again.
Always one step ahead of the grim reaper are the spring-blessed, over-sexed, very next sowers.
Modern Soliloquies & Pastiches 