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How To Live Forever
Let’s start small.
Begin by taking a second
Out of your busy busy life, and let a minute go by.
Don’t worry
If you start to get a little bored; this is natural.
Try emptying your mind. Close your eyes and defy sound.
For a minute, you were nothing.
Now we can move on to larger chunks of time.
Start with an hour. If this succeeds,
Try becoming nothing for 3, 4, a day. Feels good, doesn’t it?
Nothing exists
Except the sense of your body. You can’t hear your heart.
After a while, you can remove even this.
Imagine sleep, but no dreams. All the color in the world
Drains down to this inside of your eyelids.
You will find that days slip past easier, even weeks
One day your eyes will open on
An empty house, and the caring will be gone. All the worry and sweat and struggle
Will be lost forever.
The next time you see, there might be snow.
The leaves will hiss off the trees in sloughs of dry snakeskin, the sun will pale and grow tired of climbing the sky. The begonias will spiderweb brown and lay limp. Shingles might fall, mold might moistly spread, but all is well.
After a while the body ceases to exist, for all practical intents and purposes. Do not be disturbed.
A vehicle of motion is only necessary for movement, and you are nothing. Who needs legs?
The world is the inside of your eyelids, which is no color at all.
You will exist, and civilizations will fall. Countries will fight and bleed and lay down like crushed insects in the prickly summer grass. Oceans will rise in spires of aquamarine and then smooth down to the perfect horizon. The moon might start to crumble, but pay it no heed.
Everyone you have ever known will have died a long time ago, but by now emotion is obsolete. You exist.
You have learned the lesson of the stones. Now you know why skulls grin.
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