Time: the First Mover’s fatal instrument

Fleet to avoid all stasis, room in which to think

Wanders a world commanding, commandeering

Marshall of squadron minutes, troops accounted indolently

Then full-brother, glad-hand too, devourer-yahoo Fate

Runs like a river turning on a plain; fit misanthrope

Fate has the natural way and is not hardly straitened

Only the changing moon foreshadows near debacles

Weighing a failing; cosseting acolytes

Following thinking men like trailing stinking harpies

Shadowy things, locked in behind, filed crocodile

Inglorious teeth turned upwards; meet for ravening

Here form in front, go two by two, The Fallen Angels

Louring their lustres, bustling brew busy party games

Profusion of deadlight beckoning; songs of favourite schema

Possets of liquorice potion offerings at their hands

Hinged in-between conflicted Man his ghostly prayer spends

As one traffic comes, besets another; which way? Either stand

Strands him ashore, and loss effuses presciently

A Holy Continuing City and fit paramour

An extravagant obeisance serves him chaperone

Its emollient embrocation, comfort to the twisted knee

Bowed down, this way and that, perplexed of alteration

Caught up, swung out as lifeless, like a ragged fairground doll’s

Time: old Creation’s first-born, taker of that nature

Double: pasts peering passive, forwards forded blind

And close in the present, straitly interstices, gates us

Nowhere bears tethers, tags, declares where we should go

Clear breaking the square injunction, boldly, whole and candid

A riotous rogue compunction, querulous action, from without

Into the roads of men as agitant disturbs us

Come with a work learned eastwards; in a pregnant garden

Stem with a sentence, regimen with a root,

Truth with a counteraction, prisoner putting sounding proof

Out from the source of time come, and escape expostulating

Saying: “The time is fulfilled; and the Kingdom of God is at hand”