Eternity

Pink slime and road forks, recurrent choices
slime returns, the route turns back and round again.
How does any parent’s mind survive the vast life
and vast failure
of a dinosaur’s earth, a place from childhood
now looping on the path of middle age.
How to balance work, school
age, love, partnership, grief with
this knowledge, this great success this great annihilation
hand-in-tail, graphics so realistic we’re not learning prehistory
we’re learning the mechanics of our current undoing,
we - I shouldn’t say we. Let I remain I, or return to it,
by which I mean me. I was we until a recent shattering. 
We worried about the pink slime for the first time,
and I have let it go. Let it grow. The fork again.
It is not a good time for me to look at this
tiny human timeline. I am already afraid of failure,
and now this again. Every day my leaden heart
pins me to the bed and yet I dream of 
millions of years of us, of this. Will we get it?
I should not be in this field, wielding
illusory acid-free folders while I want us all
to last so long my work is obsolete, cannot
be sustained. Let me be lost to vastness,
a fossil. Let life roll on and make this season
small. I want to miss each moment of the million,
wiping the slime, choosing the path, again and again
and again