Reincarnation Blues – Canto IV

From Ascent of the Blessed by Hieronymus Bosch

by Frank Thomas Smith

Meditating on the mother of questions,
(I don't mean the coronavirus
Or the first class esoteric lessons)
But the one that necessarily concerns us:

Sooner or later you'll want to know
If life has meaning and if so: what?
We can start be presuming the answer is: no!
If that's the case are we alive or: not?

Or are we actors in a computer game
As the movie Matrix wonkly warned?
Like death itself it's all the same:
No one emerges wholly unharmed.

But if life – human life I mean –
Is real, then so are you and I
Not to mention nature's green
Life of leaves that will also die.

Don't bother going to church
To confess your tawdry trespasses;
It'll surely leave you in the lurch
Cause God doesn't give freepasses.

The killing going on with so much terror
Could make you resort to Brother Booze
But that would be a fateful error
Intones the Reincarnation Blues.