Reason

Reason


There is so much that I don’t remember,
both before and after.
Perhaps memory understands what is best
deleted, edits boring bits and, if kind,
the unbearable.
I remember how I felt when I first understood
that I don’t matter.   I was very young.
It was not so much revelation as
mathematical truth, practical praxis.
It has been a useful meditation,
a disinclination to connect.  Better to contain
conception of my prey out of context,
disentangled from emotion, in a place of
dismissal.
Though it is not as if humanity generally
strikes me as worth consideration.
An unwholesome lot, all of us, despite
individual heritage or mewling excuse.
It’s all about who eats who, who gets to
stomp on top and call the tune.
I have never had the luxury of stature, or
charisma.  Apparently the role bequeathed me
is long void.
Over so little time the landscape changes,
fashions, technologies, populations, beliefs.
Without changing, I adjust.
There are always natural victims, natural
bullies, a surfeit of people never missed
to feed on.
Is this part of Nature’s plan?  Are there
sharp and hearty spawn that rise, that prosper,
while the rest struggle for every breath
in the common pit?
It’s not my world.
Neither feral instinct nor moral rectitude
are my masters. I am but another prisoner
of gravity.
There is too much time, duration;
simplicity gets tangled for effect.
I perceive signs, patterns, messages in gestures
or unexpected sensations that evoke memories.
Who I am is unimportant.
What I do is negligible.
I am my own reason for being.
How can we miss what we have never had?
What is there to know that can’t be known?
Why both with conundrum, koan or poetry?
Something has to fill the time.