The Principles of Earth

The Meaning of Life

To whom can one turn for the meaning of life
When a powerful distraction is a mango and knife?
Turn to the experts:
 
Neuroscientists speak of expanding consciousness
In magnetic resonance with the body at rest
In the sweetest homeostasis
 
Buddhists meditate on sutras channeling clarity
Of fire in mind, orchestrating the eight
Guides on an elegant path
 
Bending thoughts against steel, the ironsmiths
Hammer impurities to oblivion, a metaphor
For purity through elimination
 
Writers speak of pounding away at the keyboard
For plot, booze and cigarette past midnight
Hanging on every word
 
Seamstresses are all about patterns, sizing up
What will be cut, stitching together disjointed
Slices into a future shroud
 
Astrophysicists reconnoiter how tiny you are
Modeling consciousness on a subatomic level
In the universe, infinitesimally you
 
Why not trust the auto mechanic, wrenching
A gestalt of organs in the whole machine
To keep from breaking down?
 
Or the glassblower warping an expanding globe
Of randomly arranged atoms of molten solid
As vague and precarious as you?
 
How to answer this question of life?
Each can help with the trained and worthy task
of savoring with skilled salvo
 
Already there before you, dangling, ripe
Mango of opportunity in red-orange and green
Lauding the principles of earth