Existential Differential
You say you believe
In demons and miracles,
Gaia and Eve,
In songlines and spirituals,
Voodoo and karma,
The Secret and aliens,
Danu and dharma,
And Episcopalians,
Dreamcatchers, leylines,
The Masons and star-signs,
Von Däniken, Xenu –
They all mean you well.
From Asgard to Jedi,
From Hades to Hell,
There you dwell.
And I, you think of as too scientific,
Too always-specific,
Too unhieroglyphic,
Too closed in my mind
And too open to doubt,
Who therefore won’t find
What it’s really about –
Too weighted by knowing
To get where I’m going,
My aura ain’t glowing
Within or without.
And I guess
That you may just be right after all,
I confess
My cynical pride’s due a fall –
That is,
If we’re really not really at all
But a part of some story
Whose telling is tall.
For mostly in stories
All magic is true,
With morals and mores
As naïve as you.
Not like in the Real World,
The boring old Real World,
Where physics still rules
And must do so forever –
It hasn’t a twisting
Beyond its existing,
But punishes fools
Who refuse to be clever.
For the laws shall apply
To each rainbow and fly –
We cannot suspend them
For even a second.
Impartial and total,
Not just anecdotal –
We’d best to befriend them,
For by them we’re reckoned.
So tell me, my dear,
Are we really right here, right now,
Just as real as we feel ?
Or maybe, somehow
Are we all, I don’t know…
Characters perhaps
In some novel or show
That scripts us and traps us,
Creates us and scraps us,
Like gods of the gaps
Where the laws come and go.
So tell me the deal,
Your ardent conviction –
Are we really real,
Or are we just fiction ?
Rhyming Couplets 