Obituary

He was just like everyone else. Selfish, shortsighted, unimaginative, predatory, mercenary. Just another member of the gang. Interested in everything everyone else was interested in. Content to be sheered. Fighting for the better grass. A propagator of genes, not ideas. Out of the barn in the morning with the rest of the livestock and back to the barn at night. Day after day. Night after night. Generation after generation. If the survival of my species relies on such as he, I long for extinction.

Let us go the way of the dinosaur and the dodo. Helped into eternity by their own stupidity and the hand of capricious competition. If evolution is responsible for us it is indeed blind. My own lineage, I'm ashamed to say, includes a long list of such creatures. Lounging in the dirt. Struggling in the mud. Striking out at each other with short sword and fist. Their hands around another's throat. Their necks marked with a neighbor's fingerprints. Closer to the snake in Eden than to God and his angels.

Love cannot save us. For we don't know how to love. We court. We flatter. We win. We use. We possess. We throw away. And leave behind a garbage heap of human refuse. We dabble in emotion. Playing each other like a grifter plays his mark. A preacher and his congregation. Jesus' little lambs. Skipping church on Sunday morning. To watch gridiron action. From cheaper, more comfortable pews. Upwardly mobile purveyors of faith. Obviously true believers. But I digress. . .

He is gone now. And so to shall we all be. Whatever we are. Whoever or whatever created us. A pack of nothing-specials. A flock of no-one-in-particulars. A pride of highly-forgettables. Residents of the barnyard. With jungle pretensions. Sheep in wolves clothing. Penned killers. Caged sloths. Victims of the whimpering apocalypse. And poets like me. More in love with the sound of their own words. Than with the living or the dead. Their lives grist for gleeful writers of obituary prose.