Surgeon Seeks Work As Unemployed Forensic Cosmologist

In my previous capacity we cultivated and harvested
living souls for research,
not an altogether undesirable nor
vainglorious preoccupation;
it paid the bills while designing various styles of eternity.
Faced with the somewhat presumptuous task of
conducting autopsies on breathing imaginations
left us and our sweaty palms
to toil beneath magnified lights,
absorb the flash of reporters' cameras
crowded in the gallery,
while in the center of the velodrome
we operated on the stage
as cycling teams of racing sins
spun furiously round and round and round us
screaming, "Work! Work! Work!".
I remember when we labored long enough
to sense a rupture, break the shell, get inside,
trigger off the flow and shock them;
they would sometimes cough themselves back to life,
sometimes.
Supposing that to be a good thing,
I often asked my patients for their autographs
as proof glued in my surgeon's scrapbook,
evidence to blackmail those who later may
threaten to expose us as
charlatans or scientists or perhaps even, politicians
bent on charring secret files
pulled from the Dead Sea scrolls.
I used to think there was a pattern
hid inside some part of us which, if tracked and plotted
would spit out the vast, unraveled code,
untie the universe;
that was until we stumbled on distinction between
God's domain and that of our own.
After that, I started sleeping late, stopped shaving and
would sit outside reliving those good old days
of dark anxiety filled with heroic angst,
my speeches as the tall, thin voice of analytic leadership,
the false joys of thinking virtue
lie in being young and brave.

Copyright (c) 2008 Gary Brown

STATEMENT/QUESTION:
What we are so very sure we think we know...