A Poem About the Meaning of Life

there once was a philosopher who spent his days

in contemplation of the meaning of life,
for he was told that rational contemplation was the key
to understanding the deep mysteries of the universe/

and as he contemplated, he listened for

the voice of Higher Wisdom,
but he was always met by a strange, terrible silence /
and the more he contemplated, the louder this silence became /

and he searched some sign of order in the cosmos,

.....but could never seem to find any amidst the chaos
and he searched for truth,

.....but the acquisition of truth stubbornly remained elusive
and he searched for beauty,

.....but there was none to be found in the plastic world he inhabited
and he searched for goodness,

....but was horrified to discover that good and evil

.....were often one and the same /

and he looked to the great sages who came before him

for answers to his many questions,
but they had no answers to offer him

…only idle words on so many, many pages of dusty texts /

and he strove to make the right conclusions and the proper deductions—
as if that would be enough to lead him to the light of Wisdom—
but all his conclusions were proven unsound

and all his deductions insanely fallacious /

and still he clung tenaciously to logic and reason

as his anchor in this topsy-turvy universe
but all his logic and all his reason in the end

were shown to be sadly impotent
when confronted with the vast void

of meaningless and absurdity that constituted reality/

and, just when he thought he had

finally, finally begun to make some sense of things,
he was stricken by a horrific illness,

...........died,

......................and was completely and totally
FORGOTTEN.