The Mirage Poem by gordon nosworthy

we live by the assumptions
located in that wiggling mass of suppositions
we recognize easily as consciousness
and which we worship even more than gods

the way we snorkel behind what we think we know
furnishes us with a lamp to dimly see things as acknowledged
in an act we vaguely understand as comprehension

imagine strings so long and easily accessed and implicitly understood
as to be considered the way things are supposed to be
and turn out to be the way we want everything to be

except experience shows us we don't have much control
over what we want or what we need
which means we lack control over the way things are

the act oflearning new suppositions of the way things are
proves to be exhausting
this helps explain why we fail to learn the hard things
why we stick with believing things we don't need to know
and easy to believe
even though this leaves us chained to dragging useless successes
and failures behind us
while reaching out to hold our trophies
without being able to grasp why success is not success
why empty vessels of understanding
leak so inexhaustibly even when empty