I am trapped in the shiny new ego, a lovely shiny new ego. I’m trapped in a lovely shiny new super-duper ego and it is as stupid as the day is long! Its stupidity is truly infinite – its resilience to the truth is legendary. It has an immunity to good sense that none can comprehend… ‘None can escape me, for I am the flea that leaps,’ I began to declaim suddenly, in full dramatic mode, but then lapsed back immediately into morose and moody silence. I was trying, as best as I could, to see something likeable about myself, but I couldn’t. A great weariness had descended upon me. ‘What a thing this is,’ I lamented to myself (because no one else would listen to me), ‘how is it even possible that such a situation could exist?’ This struck me as being a bizarre incongruity. How is it possible to be a being without anything good about them at all, to be a creature that is bad in every respect, and be painfully aware of the fact, and yet still have to live in the world and create some sort of life for oneself? To be unaccepted by the world, rejected by the world, seen as abhorrent by the world, and yet still however have no other option but to live in that very same world (because – after all – there was no other)? This was a bit of a philosophical puzzle for me, and I had little enough appetite for such things. Philosophical puzzles, that is. I was sitting in Starbucks drinking an Americano and nibbling listlessly on a cinnamon swirl. Has the joy going out of my life, I wondered? Viral pseudo-realities were proliferating quietly under the table but I ignored them. I was looking for the poetry in the moment but it eluded me. I knew well that there was poetry in every moment – that is something of an axiom in my book. If one agrees that there is such thing as a basic axiom with regard to ‘life in general’, which you may not do. The basic axiom that I’m talking about is here is the one that states that it is totally and utterly impossible to escape from the intrinsic poetry of life, no matter how hard we try to, no much how much much we want to. We could attempt this feat of course, and it is in this way that we create for ourselves the ongoing drama of life, the ins and outs of it, the ups and downs of it, the thrills and spills of it. We are bound to fail in the end of course and this very failure is part of the poetry that we are trying so hard to escape. It’s a superlative flourish of poetry, it occurred to me. A staggering flourish. How remarkable and ironic it is that our all-out attempts to escape from the intrinsic poetry of life ends up creating (quite involuntarily of course!) the most rarefied poetry of all! That in itself constitutes a reformulation of the basic axiom that I have just mentioned; we could say – in other words – that the attempt to escape the poetry of life is in some strange way the best poetry of all…