Is reality filtered through one’s culture
No longer reality? Or is it
That reality without a cultural filter
Is not reality at all, but only
An unobserved function of biology
Chemistry, geology, or radiation
Whose purpose is unknowable because
Without the perception of God or man
It doesn’t exist

And neither does the snake, which might have been
But then, maybe it is Schrodinger’s snake
Or was
Or might be

They say that the first cultural bias you ****
Is the most difficult, that it becomes
Easier after that. But it isn’t so.

After a hard life along existential trails
Of assumptions examined to dust, you want
To put away your Hegelian dialectic
And settle down in a little cottage
In the country with a few good books, a garden,
And Aristotle’s unities, but there’s
Always a young concept-slinger who thinks
He’s faster on the synthesis than you
And calls you out on your legendary denial
Of the knowability of objective reality

For the rest of your life (but do you exist?)
No matter how carefully you sharpen your syllogisms
Somewhere out there in the darkness it lurks:
An ontological proposition with your name on it