Even

"Every idealist abuses his nerves, and every sentimentalist brutally abuses them. And in the end, the nerves get even."

And how would we know who we are
Within these swirling vortices
Created by the gravity
Of biological success
Sucking down the cumulative
Pools of cultural histories?
We're in here somewhere, as patterns,
Perhaps, but I suspect there's more.

It's true enough that, in cliches
And prefabricated nonsense,
Comprising most human signage
In all media from rock art
To pillow talk, barfly banter,
Dim celebrity interviews,
The faintest trace of persona
Haunts slight idiosyncrasies,

And that even monumental
Cultural temples of voices
And visions renowned for greatness,
Uniqueness, strange life histories,
Unmistakable elegance
And brutality of showing
Their worlds to the rest of our worlds,
Are recognized by and for shapes

Hidden within the otherwise
Borrowed and inherited ways
That the god, the prophet, the ghost,
The genius commanding language,
The revolutionary sent
To redeem our moribund thoughts,
Our dull, craven acquiescence
To what we were handed said no.

But we feel that we are. We feel
That we are more or other than
Either these feelings of bodies,
Cosmopolises of switches
And genes synchronizing their cells
And the cells of their parasites,
Commensalists, mutualists,
And invisible hangers-on,

Or our monstrous assemblages
Of inward-turning signalings,
The gobbed, colonial bolus
Of culture that rides like a foam
Of concentrated detritus,
Torn boats and homes and plastic ducks,
A kind of mangrove swamp of thoughts
Cut loose and accumulating

More junk, myths, legends, toilet lids,
Prayer flags, mass-manufactured saints,
Heroes from alien planets
First cast loose from someplace destroyed
By the time any flesh wanted,
Without understanding itself,
Return, always circling the waves,
The Flying Dutchmen of our faiths.

And if we are, if we are more,
Caught, but not a part, but apart
From the sticky, springy, spinning
Lines of languages, messages,
Melanges, collages, messes,
Not the sum of interstices,
Not even quite wholly contained
By holy interpretations,

Then what could we possibly be?
We're murdered as we introspect,
We're birthday parties for donkeys
Without tails, as in children's tales,
The doleful imagination
Of "here we are, and there we are."
I can't accept this.  I believe,
Thanks to the crucible of doubt

That can't add, but can get rid of,
Can't transubstantiate the flesh
Or squeeze gold from philosophers,
With or without their worthless stones,
But can absurdly simplify
The tinctured wish of the complex,
That we exist right now, right here,
Even as all else disappears.