what fits into a soda can

when the youngest are the first to die

how small is the urn, will the ashes

fit into a twelve ounce soda can?

cremains sounds like a non-dairy creamer,

the box should have a black carnation

if all the hair and skin and toe nails I've shed

were gathered together in a great big pile……

i wonder how big that would be?

bigger than my present sixty one year old body? probably.

it'll join those sheddings soon enough.

not to mention the unmentionables

that have already rejoined the biosphere

and i can imagine that a day could come

when a smear of dick cheney's shit

or a shard of  vlad the impaler's skull

a snippet of mother theresa's pubic hair

could be stirred into a jar

of genetically modified stem cells

and then……… what? it's not preordained.

they might just turn out to be:

the mean village dog catcher

or a border agent, a cashier, or a banker

a cook or a librarian

none of that will come of me

no clones or kids,

just this. and all the bits and bytes

that outlive the ink and platinum fiber prints

not to mention this flesh and bone.

well, all those ones and zeros

occupy some molecules, somewhere,

in that sunlit upland called the cloud

and even those days that bathed

in a golden summer of oaks and grass and lust,

-that went on for years …….and years

all these little scraps of thought

or images….mute pixels,

they have an actual physical existence:

molecules on servers.

and if you gathered them all up,

bit by bit by byte,

i bet they'd weigh a lot less,

than twenty one grams.