WHAT PRICE IMMORTALITY

To live forever.
What a price to pay,
for an eternity of happiness,
-- an infinity of sorrow.
To see the mountains rise
and glaciers
form.
Move.
Melt.
Break.
To ride continents
searching for jig sawed fixtures
to fit into nice and easy.

What a price for Love.
To do over and over and then
divorcing yourself from a life forever.
-- after each death.
Imagine all of your children
dying before you.
In your hands
generation after generation.
Can you imagine doing more in your lifetime
than an entire World?
Can you imagine living through
centuries of Alexander, Hannibal, Mohammed, Ming, Khan, and Attila?
Decades of knowing Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, and Bush.
It’s like comparing a sun rise of 395 BC
to one of 1960 AD.
They all begin to look exactly alike,
all the blurred minor details.
It’s like meeting people in a large crowd,
the names all sound the same.
After awhile.

With all the other people you have known,
-- for millenniums,
you stop remembering them for
they are just minor characters
given cameo roles in life.
It's as autumn as autumn can be
when you feel that the faces that you never forgot,
begin looking like people you know.
And as much as the common phrase,
"You look like someone I know",
in your case it has more of a meaning
because it’s true.
You have met them before.
You have met everyone before
because you are living forever.

There is often a time,
in people's lives,
when ashes to ashes
and dust to dust,
bathes them in absence and obsolescence.
To you, these are just words
labeled for petty, self absorbed
primitive, self-indulged creatures of repetition.
Glorified obsequies.
Icons so empty
it echoes
in the void
of your soul.
Stone cold
and harden by the perfection of your living.
And your wisom due only to your existence in
the perfect age of Infinity.


What Price Immortality by Shazza Nakim
Copyright © by Peace of Mind Publishings and with permission by Shazza Nakim