My Last Wishes

No one should use any method on me that artificially maintains my life

If I am sure to die and there is no real remedy, let me go without regrets

I wish that my organs be donated should they be of use to anyone else, but not for profit

I do not wish that I should ever travel to any funeral home

I reject being embalmed and will have no one pay for any commercial services

Keep the undertakers and the preachers strictly away from my passing

I ask that I have no coffin but merely a simple, degradable piece of cloth

In fact, a warm and trusted old wool blanket will suit my needs quite well

I accept no spot within a cemetery but prefer anonymity in some open land

Just keep me far away from the traffic’s poisonous roar

I request that no strangers speak over me unless no one else knows me there

I specifically deny that preachers, ministers or priests use me as their prop

If you can find it, you might read The Beckoning Void very quietly

A little gentle music would be nice, if anyone there can play

I would like a shallow burial such that I might help nourish the good earth

Please plant some native species directly over my unmarked grave

If times are bad or I am poor, simply leave me outside in my work clothes

Feed me to the crows, rodents and insects and let my bones bleach out in peace

Let me face the Winter sun should I perish in those snowy mountains I loved so very much

Leave me somewhere that is unvisited and unlikely to be disturbed

My writings are all that I have of any personal value

Do with them what you will

Give my stuff to my wife, family, relatives and friends in order should they want it

Then donate it all to charity, recycle it and, finally, throw away anything else that is left

Finding My True Place In The End

Take a deep breath, at least one of the molecules entering your lungs came from Caesar's last breath. Enrico Fermi

There will still be a place for me amid the inorganic and the inanimate

Taking part in the complex cycles of the atmosphere here on earth

Cycling with the moon as she waxes and she wanes

Flowing with the tides in steady and peaceful respirations

Falling with the gentle rain from clouds of mist above the valleys

Crashing on a rocky shore with no one there to see

Carried upon the wind that always blows across the southern ocean

Inhaled by the plants in one form and respired in another

Circulating deep within the ocean around the globe for many centuries

Exposed with the dancing motes of dust backlit by a shaft of sunlight

Thrust up with the mountains built during vast tectonic plate collisions

Flowing with many different rivers through long inter-glacial epochs

Glowing with the northern lights in the star-filled Antarctic sky

Part of me in the rolling dawn and sunset that travel around the world

Ingested by the plant eaters and left behind to nourish wildflowers

Breathed in by living organisms to become part of them as well

Reacting in the upper atmosphere with the sunlight that sustains

Escaping into the quieter reaches where the planet’s gravity is not measured

Subducted down below the earth’s crust to flow up again with the liquid magma

Part of some few molecules in certain raindrops of every passing storm

Refracted briefly in a rainbow visible from one empty spot on the desert floor

Locked for centuries in the bogs or for millennia in coal deposits

Merging with the sun when it grows to claim us in its old age

Rippled by the passing of the cosmic background energy

Falling as snow and merging with the icecap for a thousand centuries

Rising with the smoke of countless burning fires

Riding with the earth around the sun, through the milky way, across the universe

Part of the biology of your sorrow and the chemicals released in your laughter

In one layer of stone finally exposed once more to the morning’s light

Helping conduct the voices of the birds and the calling of the insects

Freezing up as winter darkens, gliding down with the falling leaves

Blind chemicals from me reacting in someone’s creation of a work of genius

Consciousless but swirling, in those patterns perceived only by the living

Busy with the cycles of the inorganic and the radiations of the life force

Part of me was part of them and will be part of you as well as all of this

Not Going To Make It

there are times when I realize that I’m actually not going to make it

          in the afternoon when it is quiet, save for the ticking of a clock

then it’s twenty years ago or twenty years from now, but it is all the same

          and I’ll be gone for a long time, quite soon, in the larger scheme of things

the sun is shining across the mountains and on down into the room

          and things just pause a moment as I work upon my knees

I know for sure just then that I am not really going to make it

          and although I might shed a tear, it’s not for the fear, but for its beauty

in those unexpected times when we pause within a short reflection

          we sometimes catch a glimpse of, as far as we can see

then I saw myself as if it were from a different point in time

          I saw again the boy, this man thought was gone so long ago, elated

and in that same moment the sunset gently faded

          as the man now weak and old tried to remember from where he came

then I knew with certainty that I was not going to make it

          but still, time had passed me by quite slowly and left a quiet comfort

while the measured clock ticks guide the afternoon sun across the room

          I have nothing left to say, save a long and drawn out sigh

though there are many times that this illusion still vibrates complete

          far stronger are the moments when the real light shows me the way

in between the ordinary and the things which change our lives

          flows a deeper river that we must ford from time to time

as we stretch our legs to start upon another journey

          the shadow of the hand of time momentarily sweeps across us

so what time have we really saved even as we count it and where is it even now

          since in a stream of disjoint instants, we see that we cannot make it

there are those brief and lucid moments when I realize who I am

          a small boy frightened by not remembering never being of this world

slowly do the dust motes float through the slanting sun

          they have always held a place for me in their silent dance 

in between my feeble wheezings there is a parting of the clouds

          and far off in the distance I see clearly that I could never make it

in the quiet stillness that moves in to soothingly surround us

          after all the mundane chatter dies away, then it becomes so clear

in the million years before I came here and in the first million next to come

          I see that even those times are lost in the billions piled up on either side

as I realize that the sun never really pauses in my little room

          so I note with some sadness that there is also nothing I can stop and hold