Expiration comes no matter what we do.
No mindfulness forestalls the serial
slough and clockwork days of burial.
It’s end-rhymed slogans that ring doubly true.

We are not safe in numbers, not safe two by two.
What it is hard to know, we misconstrue.
And human love and unison are null
when even solitude is terminal.

Abandon, please, the fiction of the will,
for gone is gone for good or ill.
Our dead stream by and streak the water blue.
Don’t let the smell of burning comfort you.

—Finally found this again.