Blindly the wilful soul asks for length of days
when its survival is assured by the lives of others,
when you yourself are the embodied continuance
of those who did not live into your time
and others who will be (and are) your immortality on
      earth—from Jorge Luis Borges, "Inscription on Any Tomb"

The end of children is the end of Time
And so
Their days unlived
The generations unborn
      of the voluntarily, diffidently, self-absorbedly childless
            call:

"Tiger and mosquito
      and microbe
            have not laid you low,
"Nor have famine
      and genetics
            and cancer
                  and war, individual or organized.
"Instead, the predator you did not
      learn enough to elude
            was your failure to sufficiently understand the gift of your life,
"The anesthesia of the trivial
      so inuring you to Eternity
"That for all of the necessary precious few moments
"You found yourself thinking instead
"Of inconvenience, discomfort, cost, 'freedom,'
      your fitness as a potential parent,
"Somehow never meeting 'the right guy'
      or a suitable 'good Christian girl'—
"Whatever chimera fit
      each new week's revision of your fantasy."

"It made such eminent good sense, childlessness,
"Reduced to just another choice in the face of heady career plans,
      fashionable gender confusion,
            passionate hobbies,
                  the prospect of first-time matings with an interminable succession of 'partners,'
                        the magnetic, reiterative pornography of ongoingly horrifying yourself,
                              your parents, or your parent-introjects
"With this most fundamental and final
"Affront."

Suicide by proxy is civilization's finest confection:
How sweet the imagined collective forgiveness of the uncountable progeny you fell!
You are the failure of the line that every previous generation must have preserved
To have produced you.

The end of children is the end of Time.
The end of children is the end of Time.