Here’s a series of tough queries for your superstitious theories,
For I find your ancient mindset very strange:
Will it still be incest if you don’t recognize each other,
Haven’t seen each other for a thousand years?
Ten thousand years?
If you’re blended into other people
Without an individual body?
Will it still be bestiality if the animal is smarter than you?
Talks to and seduces you?
Will it still be necrophilia if the death’s intentional,
By someone who will be revived, wants to enjoy
The random insults and dissolution of
The body after death?
I’ve no quarrels with your morals or your self-awarded laurels,
But review your preconceptions. Life will change!
The subject of transhumanism and post-humanism is endlessly fascinating to me. We are very early in the discovery stage of how the body works, how genes work, what causes aging, how we can successfully tinker with our physical structure in order to increase our capabilities and, more importantly, live healthily for as long as we want. But then what happens in the rest of society?
My personal opinion is that anything that anyone has ever thought of, someone has tried to make reality, even if they failed miserably at the time. Even in ancient times people tried to find ways to live forever, to fly to the moon, and to see what others were doing in distant lands. And any grotesque personal activity that you can imagine has already been tried. So as our capabilities expand, things are going to get very, very weird.
This poem was too bizarre in both form and content for most of the places I get my work published. Therefore a natural, perhaps, for Bewildering Stories: Don Webb published it in early 2019.
Technically, of course, this stretches the definition of formal poetry… which matters to me, but not to Bewildering Stories. In effect, the first two and last two lines are a formal poem, but the meat of the speculative discussion is in the central passage which is, honestly, prose. But I still like the poem. If it is a poem.
Form in Formless Times 