The Great Punchline

A free verse poem

The music ends the dancing stops colors dwindle to null

and then nothing, no noise, no color, no sensation at all.

Who among us will be the last to ask the unanswerable one last time?

Where does that last breath go when lungs cease to function?

Or how about the energy propelling blood through hearts, arteries, veins, brains?

And what of that stuff between our ears;

the sparks that allowed meat-bags to learn how hearts beat and how lungs work, but never the why,

never, ever the why?

And what of those abstractions that distracted from our collective waking dream;

the electrifying greed that drives us to acquire the most things;

the libidinous lust that bribed us through pleasure to replicate on a rampage;

are these things as meaningless as they feel to those earth-walkers blessed with lengthier lifespans

now clued-in on echoes of the great punchline?

Imagine these mysterious unseen mechanisms we named souls

leading, propelling essence of saint and sinner, billionaire and beggar collectively

towards our respective endgames, dispersing from our craven shells, returning to their collective menial tasks

of holding galaxies together or increasing our cosmos’ rapid expansion.

Imagine the essence of saint and sinner, billionaire and beggar comingling, eternally confounding astrophysicists

until the questions themselves lose cohesion and meaning,

our values and wealth, only ever as valuable or worthless as the personal limits placed upon our own perceptions.

Now, I do not even know whether that would be amazing or depressing, but wouldn’t that be something?

Or would it?

I don’t have an answer, but I still hear the music, so let’s just keep dancing.

You’ve read this far; care to read a bit more?