The tenants of enlightenment are antithetical to the tenets of survival.
What if Socrates had refused the cup. What if Christ split after dinner.
Philosophy. Rhetoric. Perspective. Audience intact. Enough to continue.
Teaching. Learning. Reading. Quite possibly, breeding.

The endarkened don’t even see a choice.
The path less traveled has grown so unraveled.
It can hardly be recognized for all the weeds.
And why? With the vocabulary of the eternal.
Why not succumb to poisoned cups and rusted nails.
For the stories they tell.

I was never educated on the ethics of the honorable suicide.
The willingly sacrifice. No one gives their children this advice.

But enlightenment, illuminates realms outside biological device.
Awake and asleep, deceased and alive.
It breaches the whole unknowable ocean.

Not just the beaches.

Where the vast majority sits. Cooking fish. On a fire.
Believing everything exists to feed their desire.
The ocean. Some broad vague outer space.
Hungry for land. Like I am. Like you are.
The whole purpose.
Not restricted to our intriguing little part.
This knowledge. Enlightenment.
Is no superpower.

It is affliction.

Explaining the pull of the moon on tides and great underwater trenches sucking down continents and burping up islands.

When people just want to go fishing.