HOW MR. O'LEARY SLIPPED INTO THE NULL

O'Leary had an office job
For which he showed up daily.
He also took to thinking very
Ontologicailly.

He once pursued a train of thought
And all of its ensuing
Complexities a bit too far:
And that was his undoing.

At 9 a.m., he came to work
And muttered, "Well, I'm here."
He booted up his laptop and
Accessed the netosphere.

He checked his emails and the news,
But then he made the blunder
Of pondering his last remark
In ontologic wonder:

"Of course I'm here, as anyone
Is capable of seeing.
But who am 'I'? And where is 'here'?
And what is meant by 'being'?"

These questions weighed so heavily
Upon his cogitation
That poor O'Leary underwent
An eerie transformation.

He very quickly lost all sense
Of who and what he was,
And forfeited his claim to his
Identity, because

You're an uncertain quantity,
To disappearance prone:
A question mark, that is, lest your
Identity is known.

And so, O'Leary dropped into
An existential dark
And dwindled to the status of
A punctuation mark.

His fellow workers heard a ZAP!!
And hastened to respond.
"O'Leary's gone!" they cried. "He's slipped
Into the null beyond!"

For all they found of Mr. O'.,
On checking his machine,
Was just a tiny "?"
On his computer screen.

From being into nothingness
He'd slid, without a doubt.
Not even Jean-Paul Sartre
Could render him thereout.

My friends, be sure of who you are.
Avoid the state of mind
That carried off O'Leary, leaving
Not a speck behind.

Be careful not to dig too deep
In philosophic stuff.
You know you are. You're you. You're here.
Now, isn't that enough?

Copyright © 2009 David Ritchie