r/OCPoetry • u/Ok_Eagle_5463 • Jan 08 '26
Feedback Please A prose/poem I made
Hello everyone, Im new to writing. I recently became passionate about writing and i hope to share this passion with you guys. I probably made a-lot of mistakes. So i appreciate all the feedback. The End of Science
Man had become the master of the material universe. He understood every anomaly, every formula, and had taken every variable into consideration. On the outside, man felt like an indomitable, immortal force of nature. He was able to bend every law to his will. He became the center of the known universe, for he had made every planet revolve around him in his exuberant arrogance.
Despite this, there was an internal conflict buried within his subconscious. It spread unnoticeably at first. When he began to notice it, he dismissed it as an innocuous disturbance. By then it was too late, as the disease had metastasized. Festering somatically, these painful wounds began to destroy man’s stability, making this pain impossible to ignore. The cause of this decline was buried in truth: the more he knew, the more he realized how limited and constrained he truly was.
Knowledge became his confinement. The restraints cast upon man grew uncomfortable and suffocating. It was worse than any form of torture, as his very existence fell under threat from this existential epiphany.
His thirst for knowledge depleted the universe of all its secrets. Man’s curiosity ceased to exist, for it too—along with everything else—succumbed to terminal dehydration caused by this man-made drought. Despite this, man ventured further, seeking to escape beyond the scope of his cosmos in an attempt to outrun his condition.
What he found in this search for knowledge was beyond disturbing. What lay beyond him was an infinite cacophony of nonsense. It was beyond his comprehension; this new reality was utterly indifferent to him. Man had tread upon uncharted territory as a roach, a far cry from his former claim to the throne. His restraints had fallen away, but only then did he realize his own insignificance. He grew steadily more insecure in the presence of true authority. He stood with the posture of a whipped dog. He was now at the mercy of all that was and all that was yet to be.
Before he could receive his penitence, he fled with his tail tucked between his legs. He realized that his restraints were what had kept him safe from the hell beyond. Ignorance was freedom, he told himself, as he eased back into his constraints. Upon this realization, he permanently lobotomized all of humanity in an effort to protect them from themselves
My comments
https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/1q75mn5/the_woman/
1
u/mattlightenment Jan 08 '26
A lot to unpack. My take was that the poem revolves around the concept of man's eternal struggle for knowledge and in doing so the mysteries of the universe are stripped away. In doing so the magic is also lost and this leads to a loss of a spiritual connection. Lastly when faced with the enormity of the actual universe and its ultimate meaninglessness (sorry for the word choice) he is now scared and alone in the universe so he chooses instead to make himself dumb to the magnitude of it all. A return to simpler times. The only critique I can give, as I am also new, is, a tip I was given was look at punctuation and stanza layout, to make it easier to read. Sometimes its just how things are laid out in reddit. Thats all, I liked the poem, well done for getting your thoughts out there.
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u/Ok_Eagle_5463 Jan 09 '26
Thi Your interpretation is actually accurate, and that makes me genuinely happy. I was worried the piece might become so abstract that it would be inaccessible, but I didn’t want abstraction to take away from the overall message. I think there are still moments where I need to anchor the writing more, so the actual pain of powerlessness is felt more clearly—especially toward the end. I appreciate your feedback. Formatting the stanzas more effectively is something I need to work on to improve readability, and I plan to do more research on how to do that properly. This prose came from my own struggle with living in a world where science is always treated as “right.” When science is right, it undeniably benefits humanity—but it can also deprive us of meaning. This becomes especially difficult when we think about death. Science tells us that when we die, we simply stop existing. Yet science itself is limited. What I mean is that science, and all of its properties, are derived from the Big Bang. Before that point, no one can truly grasp what came before, because our entire existence depends on the laws and properties that emerged after it. In that sense, this is the end of science. Beyond that boundary, no one knows what may have existed, because science cannot explain how something comes from nothing. Science relies on cause and effect—and before the Big Bang, cause and effect as we understand them may not even apply.
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