Our existence is an exercise in fiction.
And it’s through a perversion of this art
that fiction becomes simulation of reality,
thus problematic.

The task is to comprehend
the problem without attempting
to provide a solution for it.

The greatest actors convey
an understanding of the problem
and are applauded as heroic
because they continue thriving
in contradiction with the unsolvable
(fictitiously real) problem.

This is theater of the mind
and valiant acts have been written
with the futility of blood.

The tragic hero’s only
certainty is his ineffective success
and our only consolation is his
acceptance of suffering.

This is our pathos.
The tragic man makes the problem
his only audience.

He must feign suffering until its pain
becomes as real as the simulation of the problem.

He then says that the salvation is unattainable,
that freedom is nothing more than
the purest state of fiction.

And in the irony of his language, he’s dead right.

Contemporary Poetry