Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (NaPoWriMo 2019, Day 1 – Write a “How-To” Poem)

Discover your first bonafide wrinkle
Then spy those ten evil grey hairs 
Bride-of-Frankensteining your temples.

Wind yourself into a Wilhelm Scream
Let your mind Hitchcock-zoom out of focus
Keep the perspective tilted at Vertigo’s acute
angle of doom with Bernard Herrmann’s violins
trilling their promissory note of Devil’s tritones:

Notes sounded by fog horns blaring at ghosts
of suicide victims who still haunt Fort Point
when the mist is low and the lonely bridge
skulks like a group of foxes prowling into the night.

Feed your goose pimples
Until your liver fattens into foie gras

“Lo que no mata, engorda.”

(Your Nietzschean grandmother famously
proclaimed every time you dropped a crust of food
on the roach-ridden floor and, instead of letting you
throw it out, shamed you into “kissing it up to God”,
before putting it in your mouth again.)

Google “Top 10 Ways You Could Live Forever”

Disregard cloning, metempsychosis, cybernetics,
mind-to-computer uploading, cryonics, vampirism, and
sending nanobots on a cancer cell-killing spree, but
tessellate at The Methuselah Foundation’s research into
why lobsters and hydras don’t show any signs of aging.

Weigh the probability of successfully covering your head
and thorax with Courage’s chitinous carapace:
the slave-chain polymer of N-acetylglucosamine,
derivative of glucose but not that kind of sugar-coating
nope, it’s the primary component of cell walls in fungi,
the exoskeletons of arthropods and crustaceans

(It’s a cat’s cradle of telomeres for all those crabs,
lobsters, shrimps, insects, the radulae of mollusks,
cephalopod beaks and the scales of fish
keeping their tender flesh protected and indefinitely young,
but doesn’t prevent them from getting netted and eaten. )

Consider the still youthful-looking Van Gogh lobster poaching
alive and sentient in its hot bath of court bouillon, smear some
Vaseline under your eyes, tweeze ten hairs, and be grateful.