Coral Reef

The philosopher forges ahead in the darkness.
He thinks the darkness is the bottom of this midnight ocean.
He pilots through an uncertain future.
He never thought to look down.

Above him the fish are playing,
High above in the twilight water
Hoping fish, loving fish, fearful fish
Logic fish, asserting fish, wishing fish

They never had the power to swim down to
The depths of his lonely U-Boat.

On the surface of the water, the ocean of reason swells
Cold and secure from the depth
Someone else is looking down through a glass scope,
They will never find the fish
Let alone the U-Boat

The sub sends out its lonely PING
And receives pings back
The pings only mean something inside the sub
Outside there are things, depthless things

But if the philosopher were to use the submersible
And dare to drop below where he thought the ocean ended
The submersible with three O shaped windows

It and he, by bionic extension,
Would discover, at the very bottom of the ocean
A sparkling coral reef of actual things,
Bioluminescent

In the coral reef, the philosopher is already lying,
Blinking, looking up at this hallucinated image of
Himself descending in a submersible

In the submersible, the philosopher has believed
So much that this thing here is himself
That when he gets to the bottom
He doesn't see that he's already there

Among the coral, the lantern fish
The hot vents. All the other things
Like computers, the Prime Minister
And the Arctic are also down here

Wondering when someone might see them
And not be deluded by the idea that
Reality can be grasped.