Times go the way ringmasters say, who crack the whip, voila!

According to the dosh of brains and social precepts

Dished out by circumstance: in climbing gangly crops,

Whose ruse rescinds headlocks, then reinvents submission,

Seeded derision wildfire raging through new pages, rendering

Old-School rules dead with much ado, upholstering adaptation

Masters of arts and science, armchair savants bring themselves

A label when at table, at grace sitting above salt

Messed, unconfessed, like all the rest, proud overrated thoughts

Endorsing them; like us provisioning splendid private functions

With fancy-dress, deserving clothes put on, a composition;

A working understanding by its propositions dangled

Not only are not things arranged in just-so smart good order

As like do chorus leaders hymns refrain as frothy pops,

Ingratiate to our douloi insufficiency-desire -

Subjects of aspiration higher wonted governed -

This has been late a practice we all struggle

But then are there men, some women too; anon, Forgotten Books

(A Company; exotic reprints, resurrection names)

Like as of old a Patriarch’s guardian angel covered-over

Encrusts them, powdery centuries of long library neglect

With scents of places one suspects the elders of old books

Have dropped defunct, bedfellow iTune relicts

Even Internet profusion one would think not to have stocked

Such things like these surprises, pease in Mendel’s sheltered gardens

Provendering full abundance, in varieties, colour, quotients

A bran-tub of delights with prizings every time

That hatters running-mad could have no haggle with it

A noiseless past-kept secret, gone unpublished, now at-large

Able in body to accomplish, fetch our kailyard lands

From elegant trajectories, le performance les doyens

In mid-career, long-service, and entitled; sailing swans

To penitential ends

And led by their own leading, followings of friends

Like cast-eyes roll, their company a world dismounted

I have seen Carter’s wonderful things in prose disbursing

I have with Archimedes found out all-surprise,

Been knocked like a fancy-hat through - with a startling blow

Vastly, and asking me a further mine divine, let conquer

My heart some more by profuse lore which remembers

Words of The Lord, works won through care’s devotions

Wrapped in a spider’s web, a local preserve of much fruit

Potable to consumers every way

Bringing sight to the blind and spirit to a weary clay

A bright light lit in Dead-man Street; it leads a better way