Tonight you recognize that
you are best described 
by a series of parenthetical phrases
each of which modifies your self-awareness
so profoundly that they cannot be
understood as separate thoughts
without having comprehended all the others first
which leaves the dilemma of where to begin
reading and parsing them all to you and it 
will take as many years as you have left
to get through them all and sort the priorities
from each other into neat packaged bursts
of knowledge and frankly it seems like
pulling those parentheses apart to get at
the nutmeats within might not be worth
the flavor each would offer to the palate
called life and learning and inner peace 
by those who want to quantify and define
that process of internal inquiry
that you have seen till now as a waste of time 
since you got all the way here without it
and that’s a hell of a long way to have travelled
without having done it and yet if there was
something to be gained you might feel cheated
if you began now with so little hope of finishing
so instead you shut everything off and go outside
into the rain-washed night and imagine 
it is perfectly fine to draw a line under all that
and say that what remains of your time
will be held in a single simple sentence
you will write tomorrow.