Poetry and poësie

Please help Doctor Meintjes

Doctor Meintjes had a minor insight, but didn’t know quite how to handle it. So he decided to publish it and appeal to readers to help him fully understand the situation. Look, he wrote, I breathe in oxygen which is carried by my corpuscles to all parts of my body. All over the oxygen combines with complicated biological compounds which then release energy (I know I’m smoothing over, but let’s not get too complicated) which I use, among other things, to stir my tea. But … here’s the rub: the oxygen is not destroyed, it simply recombines in different configurations. The energy that has been released with the help of the oxygen, seems to disappear, but that is probably not true, since according to conventional wisdom, energy cannot be destroyed. So here we sit with this situation: I use oxygen and employ energy, but both these …er … entities, are not diminished. It seems I’m not using u anything, but go through life as a changing ripple on the surface of reality (to use the first image that comes to mind). Dear fellow ripples, please help me understand this.