A mortal lie to try to do too much

Touch on the little things; there you make yourself your smutch

Most things go way awry, if not in-hand, far off

And rebound consequence, from Cairo to Cape Wrath

Comes thousand mellifluous, valoroso plots,

Get an idea, a stratagem; go shake the pots

Builded before a stone, or floor, engaged, established

The prize in the mind's eye a mumbler's hanker languished,

Go small, therefore withal, less baggage, damage, suffered

To rue when you pursue your stately pleasure dome

In Xanadu, and do so far from satisfaction's loams

To crash, no cash, ah woe befalls, the spirit's labours lost

Some other's lot to have you lifted, renovate, embossed,

With novel schemes and backers, scented sentiments banal

To overflowing bringing yet more wind in behind your sales

You hurry home procure a loan; your start afresh entails

Another hearse, another futile moral requiem

For a very sorry nugatory endeavour

For all your force of eagerness, still blasted, casting feathers

With the destitutes in judgement, endemic bankrupt scoffs

No sense, no wherewithal to ask of truth a faith:

An onion-seller on a wintry tidal flat

A roller-coaster on a shifting sandy platt

Attend to greater action than your wonted mental slap

Disposes to coop chickens, or to rear a cabbage patch

Why waste yourself in spending others' energies,

Abrading trust and confidence with prank celerity

Who makes you to behave and crave so bold position?

A cockle in a peaked-hat with a wilted sprig of hyssop

In-tucked, who thinks himself king of the topmost batch

And ends delicious hot inside a tasty seafood wrap

Yours is no big shot big time debonair celebrity

The pause betweentimes is your nook, not the ninth sphere,

The place where you best show, so grudgingly sincere

To want you stick-by, not taught of what went west

The uses of adversity well suit your temper's hest

Stay down, don't clown in other people's brash saloons

Your braces slackened, trousers halfway round about the moon,

Between ankle and knee, bespeaking reams distraction

You're some misnomer, rid your hopes of famous fiction

Refuse the pose, part-mannered, part dissembled,

The members of the clubs are not of your ensemble;

Have spotted, jotted down you're flash, like cellophane

An artificial coating, no McCoy, a voiding drain

A cache of strength that water-sodden tissue-wipes

Could match - no, better - separated milk

Has more in it than swims in vapours of your ilk

So know, and be contented, be a loser, gladly be

Or else by misadventure gain some ruder sobriquet