Pick a country; choose a side;
pick a religion, all the while
insisting you and only you are right
and I shall laugh, while pretending...
well pretending nothing, I will just laugh...
Let's talk about the reality of things, solidity, substantiality,
versus the irreality of thought.
You have been taught to draw lines on the world,
to cut things up, as if this was a clever thing, to say:
"here are the boys
and here the girls"—
to take a popular example
and I am laughing again and shading with crayons
where your line goes multifractal in-between,
in the place you mysteriously cannot see...
Can you even see your pencil?
It has an rubber on the end,
or is that an eraser with a pencil on the front?
You know, I could stab someone with this
or load it in a crossbow
and though it would not fly so far or straight
it still would kill a man.
So is it a dagger, is it a bolt?
Are you clawing at your reasoning,
trying to find the fault?
Why does this pencil, this woman, this philosophy not classify?
I'll tell you here and now
the absolute and perfect reason why:
atoms.
It just takes atoms,
to show most human thought is pish.
This isn't a pencil, it's a grouping of particles.
It is what it is,
and it does what it does;
and we can't entirely know either case.
See? Now I wrapped it in duct tape
and jammed it in the printer where,
because I could sharpen it to the right length
it serves to hold the broken toner cartridge in
until we can get a new one.
It was never a pencil!
It's a adjustable compression prop.
Your attempts to understand must have a stop,
not because the analysis is wrong...
Analysis is great, please do more!
Draw lines, calculate error bars,
shade some portion of the chart where dragons
provably cannot lie
but never forget:
things are as they are
the analysis is just our latest, bestist, most-partial guess.
So chill a little.
It's what it is,
whether you will or no.
Let it go.
