Thinking

When I was a child
I almost thought myself into insanity
And I grew up embattled still
When things tend to curl up into nothingness
Or fly off into infinity
My mind goes wild
And becomes unsettled
And why shouldn't it? It was never designed
For thoughts of this nature at all
At some point I just stopped ramming my head against the wall.

With clever mathematical tricks and
With ships we saw just how big our planet is
With telescopes we see how insignificantly small we are
Gliding around our mothering star,
In the face of larger and larger-scale structures
From our solar system to galaxies, to clusters of glaxies
And even supercluters that draw the bubble-and-void lattice
Of an entire unfathomably huge universe
Which may be only one of many "verses"
In the epic poem called everything.

With a microscope we saw life beyond the grasp
Of our naked eyes, worlds within drops of water,
And cells within this life, life of its own
Which had once upon a time roamed freely
And even within the organelles there are proton pumps
And stranger things still, all made of molecules,
Which are made of atoms, which are made of quarks
And muons and neutrinos and things which only
Atom smashers and computers can now convey to us, and
Mean anything only to a learned, priestly few.

Maybe science doesn't march towards an answer
Make endless predictions that will lead one day
To an 'equation that fits on a t-shirt,'
Describing the smallest and the largest with the
Same unbiased use of objective, nonarbitrary laws
Maybe it's not a matter of unpeeling all the layer of the onion
To see what lies at the heart of the onion,
If the onion simply unpeels forever
And at each stage grows a factor stranger and less meaningful
To these brains which evolved for communicating
And seeing depth well, so we could hunt big game

Maybe science doesn't have any meaning,
Any answer, any end at all, or one that we can ever get at;
Maybe it just becomes too hard to understand.