I tried to know the world
once.
Really know it.
Not the postcard version.
Not the goddamn brochure.
I leaned out the window of my skull
and asked reality
what the hell it was doing.
It didn’t answer.
So I drank cheap wine.
Then something stronger.
Then I noticed something ugly:
every time I touched the world
Space.
Time.
Categories like cheap furniture
I kept hauling with me
from room to room.
I thought I was seeing things
as they were.
Turns out
I was seeing things
as I was built to see them.
Like a guy who thinks
the bar smells like whiskey
because the world is drunk,
not because he is.
Causality?
That was mine.
Substance?
Mine too.
Even necessity
had my lousy handwriting on it.
The world wasn’t lying to me.
It was quiet.
I was the one doing all the talking.
God?
Couldn’t prove him.
Soul?
Couldn’t cash it.
Free will?
Depends who’s asking
and how sober they are.
Every time reason tried to go past its limits
it face-planted
like a boxer who forgot
there’s a tenth round.
Metaphysics wasn’t something noble.
It was a bar fight
between ideas
with no referee
and no closing time.
So I did the unthinkable.
I told reason to sit down
and shut up.
Told it:
you don’t own reality.
You organize appearances.
That’s it.
Don’t get cocky.
You want the world in itself?
Too bad.
You get the world as it shows up
through your crooked lenses
and your bad habits of thought.
And morality?
That wasn’t in the stars.
That wasn’t in nature.
That didn’t fall out of ontology
like a loose screw.
It came from somewhere worse.
Inside.
A law
with no alibi.
No cosmic backing band.
No metaphysics to hide behind.
Just:
do this.
don’t do that.
No appeal.
No escape hatch.
No story big enough
to make it optional.
I didn’t make the world meaningful.
I made it limitable.
Put reason on a leash.
Marked the edge of the cliff.
Told it where it could walk
without lying to itself.
The world stayed strange.