Embracing Death
a poem to read on my deathbed
Time is a god,
a patriarchal overlord,
swallowing our consciousness,
confining through amnesia, the truth
of our eternity.
Swallowed into gravity,
the Fall lasts for — who knows?
This god makes time so illusive, inconsistent,
relative from variables of gravitational manipulation.
In this Fall, I’m filled with dread
I dread to die…no
to lose life.
In this Fall, I cry out for mother. I cry out to Life.
But the louder I cry for Her, the louder the god’s delusion takes over.
I don’t know how.
I don’t know why.
I don’t know when.
I don’t know who.
I don’t know where.
I don’t know what.
I don’t know how…
Approaching me, my mother smiles.
I gape, my fear — she…smiles?
It is Death that I had beckoned.
Death, the keeper of time —
whose womb holds within it the eternities
and whose ecstasy produces Life,
that experience the eternities she harbors.
Why do I fear Her so?
It is the delusion of an arrogant god to accept
that out of the billion years worth of matter
— never dying, only transforming
by the will of photon magick —
only 70 years of this
is the best
of what is out there.
