We're Fooled

We're fooled by increasing vitality

During the thirty years after first breath;

Despite downplaying our mortality

Birth is the commencement of creeping death.

The next twenty we spend acquiring stuff,

Basking in our fecund, productive years,

But apoptosis declares, "it's enough,"

And telomere affirms the end is near.

We try, in our last thirty, to delay

The aging process with gimmicks or worse;

No longer do we deny or gainsay 

We only wish the process to reverse.

From birth our life's outcome is known to all

Death makes its steady, unrelenting crawl.

January 2016