In Which The Poet Admires His Lack Of Understanding Of The Phrase “Life Is Short”

I’m afraid of how simple it is,
to injure eternity by thinking about it.
The present is revisable the moment
we enter it, but getting there is dangerous,
roulette with a six-tongued polyglot
who can only be understood in smoke.

I assume the future will be more vertical,
that every corpse planted since our ether
nights will bring new banana trees
so we can keep making dick jokes
at lunch, that culminating to a “complete
poems” worth will be the heavy mausoleum
that keeps us from aggrandizing the end
in some slime of heroic couplets.

There’s a kink in the dismemberment,
our city plans set afire by automatons
who swept the Oscars, who keep
getting digital touch ups, who can only say

There’s nothing to see here,
we’re fine, everything’s fine, how are you?

-C.S. Henderson