Because the cosmos to the smallest particle

Whatever might be that peculiar article

To tunes, the ancients had it, moves in monstrous constant flux

Makes merry in a flurry of endemic switches

Takes jollies trailing holiday extravaganza

Because the odds are stacked against the serried evens

Perforce perpetual contraries hitch arm in arm

They stir the slapstick wiggles in the tiny worm

Whose antic funny turns bring down the harvest barn:

Whereas the lumbering juggernauts, massive of matter

Cart, tussle round, no sound, no merrymaking clatter

In swirl a solid curl of galaxy - a billowed starry platter

Nor nothing stays to halt awhile, and no next station stop

The variegated barley nor the nodding savoury hop?

They obey the crooning winds' Atlantic existential leaps

The winds obeying heated sun whose solar panel sweeps

Press hardly on the earth to squeeze the berry juices sweet

Come factually as miracle out from the dirts of soils

The place where strands of wiggly worms perform their balmy toils

Behold the whole, the part, the fraction, even the loamy slice

Remove from place to place, their ardours will not take advice

Won't settle down nor gather roots, give over roaming

Through wayward ways their salad days deny all calls to homing

Then there's that creature man who would be teaching granite stone

This worthy pedagogue must sally on; he's thinking bone

And flesh; a crass mistake, or else a fancy idler fellow

That doffs his cap set sidewise as a dandy at the blether,

As ornament to pleasure, agitator of the living God

Nor can this splendid slam of grand perpetual carnival

Which tyrannises worlds, enamours, Dalai Lamas

Compose to rest, set sleepy in benign pyjamas,

A token break; hiatus: in the sauna or Bahamas

There is no stopping, like our shopping, it goes on and on

Hours wear the clock like money tellers' feathered burring thumbs

The windows of the years get bleared, glaze over forgotten names

Upon a dumb aplomb worlds move without apprising

Occurrences, abeyances; and lives downsizing

The epicentre of this lamp-lit universe

Its light exhales a little hazier, lazier, every day

An artless masque, peripatetic waltz

Somewhat less lustrous sends than heretofore issued

As mood for movement lessens slowly to a roll

Skyey incendiary enthusiasms wander not so hot

And so it goes, at first the toes, and then the ankles shot

A mite the older hobbles, wobbles, as the torso sags

The persons of the planets hoare removing from their places

By small degrees retire into their due funereal spaces,

Vibes winding down, tend to a bourne where entropy encroaches

Here binding clauses offer causes for laws of shortening reach

Evaporations, dissipations in a wholesale wake

Repose must acquiesce, but it may never thole

At last here parks a past all done, movement depleted

Become a gulf wherein all time resigns capitulated

And all is finished with; the cosmos swept, and packed, and dusted

Gone's sin its opportunity, gone all the savage wastage

Risk moribund lays down in happy summer shearer’s shades

Mad daring sheds a tear and exits; following comes arrayed

In sorry colours joie de vivre, a sinkhole in a corner

As merriment slept somnolent, no peep agone forever

All, all, at stasis, not a church-mouse hovers, neither moles

Nor manatees make slippery tryst, no laughter blooms, no lovers

No griefs, no pale to soar before a westering firmament

The way of things all boarded-up, strife's late infirmary

All images lie wrecked..

But what comes out of this surceasing? – might a speck

Enough, sufficient, half a quark, re-engineer leftovers

Survived alive as broker, shaker-up that calls things new;

One morsel embryonic gem to serve love tokens true

Within that heart that at the start began this plan: might cast

His alms and gather inwards home, a sloop of scurvy chiels

All-comers claught together, trooped, commanded to His will

From the interstitial spaces, hedgerows, highways, dragooned, scooped,

Brash agencies who governed bringing in the other-ranks

The subjected oppressed, the cotton-pickers on the flanks

The handsome rich offenders bid a voiceless unaddressed

Then doubters and debauchees, those who gave too certain 'yes'

The well-assured who mires the pure dured, spacious jarring wars

Had sold as threads out of their heads immersed in self-regard

Let we stray churls be gathered in, on recidivist mercy

Where cares know dance, beguiled with jaunts to chords, say Handel's Serse

Let this, or something like, my prayer consist - my Lord, Thy word be...