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Competition With Death

It hardly seems a fair fight,
it’s like death has already won,
we’re doomed from our conception,
it’s over before it has begun.
We live our whole lives in fear
of when it will come for us,
spend billions to hold it off,
to beat it back is the cause.
But nothing ever tames the beast,
at least nothing we’ve found yet,
how much of life must we spend
in competition with death?

Its presence rules the universe,
a lifeless stretch of gas and rock,
we try to give it meaning,
but it’s all just words and talk.
Even amongst the sentient,
the rare beings in the know,
we see in the end we’ll be like
those inamate hunks of stone.
Not animated with the spark,
unmoving, with no breath,
we fill our days with franticness
to distract ourselves from death.

But the more that you think on it,
death’s deficiencies are clear,
it never knows, nor feels a will,
not for a minute of a year.
It can neither act nor do,
it cannot respond to stimuli,
death can’t do much of anything,
Because death never is alive.
It cannot write a novel,
nor can it paint a town red,
it can’t love, or strive, or achieve,
it cannot do much, this death.

And though it may come take us,
there’s truth enough in this:
While it may be our end,
It can’t make us not exist.
Objectively, it cannot erase
the fact that we were here,
that we’re sentient actors,
despite our weakness and fear.
Our life death can’t experience,
and that cannot be undone,
there’s no competition with death,
it’s a game we’ve already won.

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