In the search for meaning,

how should one begin?

With a humble, kneeling prayer
invoking the Flaming Cubes of destiny
or some other omnipotent entity?

No, too religious and shallow.

By seeking the stark, barren entrance of the Great Void;
that distant gateway to the realm of the gods?

No, too impersonal and foreboding.

How else then?

Through the madman’s midnight ravings,
such quests must first commence
with a minute, epiphanous spark
deep inside the solitary mind;
Relentlessly flaring thus outward
into the murky, unstable realm
of abstract life beyond the here and now.

From that faint, emanating glow
rising flame turns inferno
and with consuming blaze
erupts a paradigm-shattering vision
of vivid experiences relived;
Mercilessly violent acquisition
and the deafening explosion of vindication.

Know now, it's not of revelation,
though be it still far
from any soft, familiar constructs.
As countless shameful memories,
recollections of one’s buried sins
now rustic and long since forgotten,
must again be unearthed,
filtered, cleansed and shelved;
Delicately purified and consecrated before all.

Through such private indictments
and rapturous trials by memory
many will discover that
like those before,
ours is a toxic, corrosive dogma;
an obsessive and nauseating orgy
of agitated sexual deviance,
senseless generational bloodletting,
public molestation of intellect
and ritualized cycles
of euphoric self-deification.

So when one exists,
as all seemingly do,
between narcissistic solipsism,
infectious cultural rhetoric,
spiritual group-masturbation
and the weighted millstone of the grave,
what then does it mean?

Where does this search for meaning end?

When our individual conclusions
are finally pieced together as one
this ultimate recognition of being,
an intricate mural of identity,
will at last be known by all:

We are the foreskin of the world.