My mother, 85 years young
bless her soul,
said to me the other day,
”A person can live too long.”
I agree.
So many people don’t think this way.
That makes me even believe it more.
There is a vast life cult out there
that everyone is participating in
and so many have signed their names to
becoming hangeroners.
Used to be that a man was
good for 25, maybe 30 years,
nobody was greedy and wanting more,
they were content and glad to
get on to the next thing and out of
the misery they were stepping in.
Yet now, everyone from the Joe President
to Jill the bulldozer driver wants immortality
and even expects it, demands it.
It’s like a right and the doctors will even
keep you alive until your last drop
even though you are no good for nutin’
and probably even want to jump off
this no longer, so merry, go ‘round.
People sit around in their older years
picking their toenails,
trying to avoid all the pain
and waiting for someone to call.
And let’s not talk about all the
destruction and death at their feet,
each day longer and
that death and destruction
it piles up higher.
It’s a life cult, I tell you and
I don’t want any part in it.
I’ve seen too much already,
the suffering this so called
love of life brings.
It’s really only a manifestation of greed.
And it’s greed that is ruining our world
one spoonful, one person
at a time.
A man can live too long
and it all begins to repeat and you tire
of the same old lines and the same old tastes
and even sex becomes but a physical pantomime.
You put a movie on and you think to yourself
”Haven’t I seen this one before?”
You go to the beach for the umpteenth time
and look out at the sea and refrain from saying,
”It’s ugly.”
A man can live too long.
The beer begins to taste flat.
Music no longer swells.
Cars lose their shine
and even the rising sun
begins to hurt and burn the eyes.
The earth is heaving for nutrition
yet you don’t give it because
you’ve been taught that you must
hang on, at all costs,
you’ve been brain-fed the idea
that death is not part of life,
it’s just a big void and null check,
and you don’t want to go there, do ya?
or in the case of you religious bents
death is not something you have any say in
or they’ll be hell to pay, if you try.
A man can live too long
each day the same record
playing the same forlorn song
while pills in little paper cups
ask you to carry on …
Where is the switch
that one can turn off or on?
Or why isn’t there one
for us who have lived too long?
Living Too Long