Imagine you're a protoplankton at the moment of your death
And the Universe with wild caprice then infuses your last breath
With the gift of sudden consciousness, and with some foresight too
So that first you know you're dying, but also that you now see through
Countless aeons of future time, and likewise through the laid down strata
Of rocks piled down to crush you to a goo, just like a squashed cassata,
Along with all your family and friends until you've all been squelched
By Time and pressure to a greasy gunk, a hydrocarbon belch
Beneath the Earth, where you'll reside in death, near Hell, a tacky slime
For vast incomprehensible extents of geological time
Though now, of course, you see through Time like glass, and likewise through geology
To clearly see the future path pursued by subsequent biology
High up above you on the land that pocks through oceans on the crust
Of Earth, and with it humankind, that imago of future dust
Who makes its money, wages wars and lays down strata all its own
By burning up your corpse, your family's too, like it's testosterone,
Ceaselessly grasping godhood by devouring the hecatomb
Which honeycombs the Earth whose surface it infests like fungal bloom,
A thanatocratic death cult, a necrophagus parasite
Which, like a stupid virus, will destroy its host. And then you might
In the nanoseconds prior to your own last consummation
Smile reflecting that each schmuck who's queuing at a petrol station
Is, despite their hunch that they're recruits for some angelic host,
Exactly like the rest of Life on Earth: eventually toast,
Destroyed by oil executives, share prices, sheiks and thieves who knew
That burning up the bodies of the long dead would then kill them too,
For death's built into life, as a failsafe measure, as a brake,
A mechanism that will, given time, correct each bad mistake
In the case of humans through the suicide of Global Warming.
And then you'll laugh, for in the oceans' depths the plankton still are swarming.