“Lotus Eater” by Glenn Wright

“Hell is other people.” —Jean-Paul Sartre

“Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein

We don’t even know if we really exist.
We experience life in a soft, balmy mist.
Our memories are suspect and partial at best.
We’re happy to do what the voices suggest.
The faces around us are rarely the same
one day to the next, but they call us by name.
They smile at us blandly with features serene,
but when we reach out, we touch a glass screen.
Our needs and our wants are supplied in an instant
by mechanical hands of our robot assistant.

Our emotions are pale; no passions molest us,
no griefs, no desires, no raptures to test us.
We can’t help but wonder, while living like kings,
what purpose we serve in the grand scheme of things.
Why are we here? Who made us? What reason?
Such thoughts are unpleasant, feel almost like treason.
Perhaps we are dead, and this is our fate:
not heaven or hell, but a limbo-like state,
a warehouse for souls devoid of all merit,
who should neither reward nor chastisement inherit.

Perhaps we are prisoners in Plato’s cave.
We see lying shadows, but freed from this grave,
by the light of our reason, someday we will see
in philosophy’s glare the true reality.
Perhaps, sent on an interstellar mission,
we sleep a millennium on the expedition.
Perhaps in some universe larger than ours,
we are a child’s project to practice his powers.
Perhaps we exist in a novelist’s mind,
gestating characters, not yet defined.

Perhaps I am lost in dementia’s maze,
or, terminal, kept in an opiate haze.
The darkest of thoughts occurs to me then.
Perhaps there’s no “we,” but just “I” in this den.
Perhaps I’m Creator of all that I see,
all the others, projections from deep inside me.
The panic of loneliness freezes my blood.
My muted emotions rise up in a flood.
I reach for the pill, knowing where it will be,
and pray for the darkness to set my soul free.

Glenn Wright is a retired teacher living in Anchorage Alaska with his wife, Dorothy, and their dog, Bethany.  He writes poetry to challenge what angers him, to ponder what puzzles him, and to celebrate what delights him.