There was a time when words weren’t signs
When their meanings were clear
Not mere signifying
There was a time when men had minds
And the world was not text
And text not self-defining
There was a time
Then it all went wrong

I dreamed a meme of time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
A meme that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving
Before the psyche had been purged
And texts were read and writ and wasted
With no horizons to be merged
When songs were sung, and wine was tasted.

But post-moderns came at night
Reinterpreting the thunder
As cultural artifact
As mere history or game

I used to read the words as writ
Never trying to deconstruct them
Never seeing stones as textual
But then postmodernism came

In this new mental map or scheme
We may still have the act of reading
But now we know its just a meme
Of cultural, embedded meaning

I had a dream that text would be
So different from this hell I'm reading
So different now from what it seemed
Gadamer killed the meme I dreamed.