Pasterity

The future's not ours, you see.
Whatever has been, has been.

I prefer pasterity
to posterity, reject
prayers for the dead
but wish for resurrections.

Could I play history's Zorro,
its karmic editor, its savior,
its sin-eater, I would.

Could I retreat with my family
to past years, before our births,
farther from Omega, I would.

Safe in the Existence Protection
Program, incognito to the doom—
enforcing, Reaper-run DieRS.

Then again, Umberto Eco said
that we speak of "following weeks,"
time follows us, is behind, not in front.

Cancer, the Happiest Disease

Cancer is an artful butcher, a virtuoso disease, a ubiquitous life-ender.
It snickers when lifelong smokers are nonagerians while lymphoma
wipes joyful painter Bob Ross from the palette at age fifty-two.

("Malignant little trees...")

Cancer, you Trojan Horror, are you ever full? Can't one soul too many
give you acid reflux, so a few are belched back onto this quick plane?
A suicidal absurdist serial killer is on the loose in our bodies, waiting.

If death is the road most traveled, you are one of Carcinogen and Driver's
10Best Cars every single year, twisted trickster, insurgent time bomb, devil.
Enviable: your freedom from rhyme and reason, your pure sense of carnival.

We Never Fall out of Love

1.
You liars, lovers, claiming you're out of love.
It's impossible for mortals, the worst hubris, a futility.
Our polygamist spirits don't compute Adam and Eve, one and onlys.

2.
Hearts are acquisitive empires, infinite investors
accruing unsung crushes, serene romances and growling flings.
Heavy is the intimate harvest of the sexually promiscuous.

3.
Though they flee or drift from us, lovers show
under spiritual luminol, are exposed like blood stains,
stratify and leave ancient evidence without fossilization.

4.
Whose hand is whose hand in a string of paper dolls?
When one of us burns we burn together: ashes in orgy.
We are links on a love chain, crescendi without climax.

5.
I know every freckle on your bodies, every taste bud,
your smells and saliva, the loudness of your sleeps, every
finger, what buttons to push and avoid, your powers, your envies.

6.
We are a second family, lovers, and we never fall out of love.
Only death will part us.

7.
We ripple outward, outward and outward,
parallel and parallel, together, together.