Robert Ronnow
The Imaginary i
Answers to Questions
--with lines by Bertolt Brecht & Alberto Moravia
Ask questions instead of make arguments.
Point of view or spinning sphere? In their mere
chronology events have no relation.
Men of bones and dust, disgusted with themselves,
actors of the moment, beheaders, rhymers, debtors,
die with their miseries uncut. Quiddity.
When people query what was our purpose,
turning some into slaves and others masters,
that’s what they mean by snow for eternity.
To know the question is almost certainly
to find an answer. What do you do
with a drunken sailor early in the morning?
How do the vast darkness
extending to the ends of the expanding universe
and the temporal light of human consciousness
interact to make the world?
Will we find the cosmos not large enough to hold us?
What is the polity’s interest in the private soul?
Why has experimentation,
which has failed in the novel,
succeeded in poetry?
About the dark times will there be singing?
Are we headed for another crazy cataclysm?
Will all be given or well?
Why are you you?
Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?
Ice cream, yogurt, profit, tofu,
what’s not to like? Avoid the I,
avoid yourself and enter the void?
I think not. Inside out,
if I die, will I know it? Does Jack even exist?
Who’s got trouble? Apocalypse
or situation comedy, which?
Copyright 2024 by Robert Ronnow.