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 ?

Grasping at Gaps

There are still things that you don’t understand, he said,
Things that your science cannot yet command, he said,
Things that will always be strange and unplanned,
Till you see our Lord God at their head.

That’s true, but I think you are crowing too soon, I said,
True, but we’re learning, for all you impugn, I said,
True, but just shrugging won’t fly to the moon,
But it will gawp up limply instead.

The Book of Numbers

As a kid, I had a Bible,
But I only read the bits I knew.
Yet in the front, it listed all
The endless books therein, and quite a few !
I read the titles, wondering,
What ancient tales they must contain –
Though most were called by random names,
Which sounded boring, sounded vain.

But one stood out – The Book of Numbers !
Was it all divine geometry ?,
Secret cyphers ?, Sacred fractals ?,
Heaven’s holy trigonometry ?
Did it declare why the speed of light
Is the very speed it is ?,
Or how the cosmos banged so bright ?,
Or how the atoms whizz ?,
Or how entangled is the quark ?,
Or why is so much matter dark ?,
Or are the anti-particles still His ?

I should have known –
Nothing but a census, a way of keeping score.
When asked for facts, the Lord has shown
That nothing matters more than tax and war.

Not that taxes in themselves are a bad thing, as I’ve mused on here and here.

Omni-Sciessence

If God is all-knowing,
That means he must know
Of all that there ever was,
All that there ever is:
How the quarks come
And the particles go –
Ev’rything, ev’rywhere,
All truth is his.

The past and the present
Are known by the Knower
In all their minutia,
Quintessence and trait.
But still there is somewhere
Where knowledge is slower –
It drips out in trickles,
And God must just wait.

Almighty all-knowing
Is shrouded in mist
When it’s scrying for knowledge
Where no god can be.
For all of the Future,
Has yet to exist –
So it cannot be known
When there’s nothing to see.

More knowedge is locked up
That knowedge he knows,
He’s learned but a fraction
Of all there can be.
He knows that it’s out there,
And waits till it shows
As slowly – so slowly ! –
It works itself free.