Optimism

(audio)

What we don't understand can't hurt us,
except that what we do understand can't hurt us either, and we don't understand this,
and so we don't understand
that we don't understand what we don't understand, and it hurts even to think about it
--- understand?

Not so much the understanding as the hurting;
how can you hurt what can't be worse? How can you
hurt what must of its own accord
die, which amounts to nothing
more than the sod it
in sleep so much
resembles. If,
as Socrates said, death is a positive
boon, if so there be no harm to it; a murderer
sheds our blood with favor, and we ought
savor the throes from whence it's bred.
Such palaver as spills kips of blood
on pricks of pins but empties butts
of senseless sin. Immune
to harm as a storm to invective,
alike to gain, we
disdain nothing more than the
encroachment of that,
inevitable as gravity,
which in our hour of direst
need, befriends us.
No oath knows the like certainty.
No vow the like trust.
Despite the fustian casuistry of
centuries of syllogizing sophists, the victimless
dockets of doubly-blinded justices
stuffed with guilty innocents
--- the outlandish yarns fool none
but the wise,
and these too have born their foolishness gladly.

Madly.

We return to that we cannot escape,
escape to that cannot return:
the diurnal frenzy of a cipher calculus,
a dispaltried paltriness,
of urgencies soon crucially
forgotten.
What harm then this in mis-
or under-
standing when so near attending
our truest friend,
spurned yet peaceful waits our certain
ending.