Understanding reached

Poem

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

To try and understand the universe
I must first try to understand myself
and fail.

I look at the mirror, I look into the abyss,
a quintillion myriad branches
of action and consequence

that led to each individual decision
bracketing this moment like a vise,
a parenthesis, a subtext:

your freedom is a myth,
the myth of the Sisyphus,
where all suffering is simple existence,

the ribcage extant amid the decay
of the heart or the scream
eroding into tinnitus and crowd noise,

think about this:
if not for the vacuum of space,
the sound of the sun would be deafening.