Forgotten For Eternity. Poem by Ripper Jones

In the case of youth,
Be they ferals or aristocrats,
Loss appears wondrously severe.
It is not only hedonistic utopias
That are gone but future ones
That are split asunder by a tragic shortness of life-
Or rather life-span.
The aristocrat lives in history but gradually
Fades from real affectionate memory
Expecting to be forgotten with no emotion.
After death how soon will you fade.
Where will you be remembered
For death is deprivation of sensation precisely.
Fastidiously immaculate.
There are no longer painful or joyous events.
There is no longer a subject.
There is no longer a self.
Not even blackness or loneliness
Can alleviate the complete hopelessness.
In this hopeless void after life.
And if there was no subject,
There was nothing about which we could
Ask the question of -
Whether it was better or worse than it had
Been when alive.
Buried in a hundred years or hence -
In whose memory shall I linger?
A circumstance of life chances
Intersecting at circumstantial nooks and crannies.

For he believed death to
Be deprivation of sensation
Precisely because he thought
There was no longer a subject to have any sensation,
And if there was no subject,
There was nothing about which we could
Ask the question of whether it was really ourself -
The philosopher's stone.

According to Lucretius,
Each period of non-existence
Is a perfect mirror of the other:
Look back at the eternity that passed before we were born,
And mark how utterly it counts to us as nothing.
This is our mirror, our future.