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END OF DAYS
Oh, my last day will come, have no doubt
about that, it’s much closer than far away,
as a child, a century or millennia distant, now
more like next week, maybe even Monday
or Thursday before lunch or just after dinner,
or sometime in those tender underbelly early
morning hours between sleep and sun, whatever,
the moment will arrive, the great machine will
sputter and cough, the heart will stop with a
silent thud after missing not a single one of its
2.5 billion beats, the family will gather round to
hold my hands, they will wait for the next breath
but there will be no next breath beyond the final
rattle of exhalation, the silence will stun, as
will the absolute absence of further kvetching,
even the bacteria in my gut will sound the alarm,
for they will sense this can’t be good (I’ve been
their host for so long…what a great partner-
ship we had!), the RNA will stop by the side of
the road and idle its engines….the transport of
cellular information will cease…the endoplasmic
reticulum will grind to a halt like Green Line
MBTA trolleys on a snowy day, workers will
gather round to recall the good old days when
respiration fired up this factory’s furnace, just
before pretty much everything falls into the
same state of disorganization as my childhood
room in the Bronx, what’s in store for the body,
useless piece of genetic junk that it is, this will
be decided in good time, what will become of
the doubts and fears, all the anxieties and
insecurities, the regrets and hopes, the rocks
and broken glass collected over the course of
a lifetime, and especially what will happen to
the memories of my children–all this, unknown.
February 5, 2015