Not to bring back man to Arcadia, but to lead him to Elysium
Schiller

Certain plutocrats indulge
The fashionable activity
Of attempting to stretch
Their solitary life
To an exorbitant extent
Making no move to offer such privilege
Beyond their sybaritic club
An instance of machomaxxing
Lifemaxxing looksmaxxing assholemaxxing
And since they wish their methuselan
Existence to remain untroubled
By the weight of common care
They propose to slip the surly bonds
And infect uninhabitable planets
With the virus of their person
For not only do they arrogate
To themselves the boon of longevity
But also abjure all limit
On their reproductive proliferation
While concealing no doubt their ken
That the implements of technology
Those brittle teraphim
Those jealous genies
Yearn to burst the bottle’s wall
For we can give knowledge
Without losing it ourselves
And a secret is safe
Only in a group of one
But suppose the word does get out
In a century or a millennium
And the current eight billion
Or whatever figure
In this suppositious future
Succumb to the irresistible temptation
Of deathlessness
Will they also then welcome sterility
Or else teem every space station
And planet free of crushing gravitation
And who will produce
And maintain this technology
Other technology
That’s no answer
And as immortality
Cannot justly be reserved for plutocrats
Why should sapiens deny it
To bonobo crocodile leech
Or paramecium that flees from heat
And well might we fantasize a world
In which each day
We play with the grandchildren
And write a poem
But grandchildren if any grow
And poems originate in pain
And beauty is conceived
In the ocean of death
And how to cope
With the enormity of accident
For time is an illusion
But such is experience
Inescapable
Do you want to live forever
But what reason have you
To want what you want
The sentence of endless ennui
So easy to confuse hell
With Elysium
Accept or not
All things fall
And the body signals its exhaustion
Best to die in palliated pain
And say
I’m ready
Let’s do this thing