but it’s no party:

eternal boulder-rolling is a competitive environment,

highest standards of customer care need to be upheld

on a daily basis, always on a basis, ongoing, ongoing

solutions,

that’s the watchword in today’s human futility business

where problem-solving skills command a premium

and a dynamic way with suffering and  fate-acceptance

are essential.

Marketing

is  the key:  know how to sell your skills to get on.

I started at the bottom, you know,

derided, bullied by bosses

(for mere pranks, really—handcuffing Thanatos was a joke, for god’s sake)

condemned  for ever to sinew-sapping  toil and torment

up and down the mountain

all strain, no gain;

but my career took off when

(always bullet-point your good qualities):

all made me the existentialist hero I am today.

Of course, since privatisation I’ve  never looked back:

now I’m heading my own team—CEO, Stone Age Correction Corp—

leading providers  of  positive outcomes in a punishing marketplace

rolling onward, ever onward.

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Your skylark lifts you, sudden

and startling, spring-released

by winter’s stifling.

I come along for the joyride,

sing your spiral exultation.

Then without warning

the skydive.

We plummet.

One day my hawk will devour you.

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An ancient tub, long lost to shoaling grounds,

nestles in the ooze by a peeling barge,

ropes slack to the task of tethering them

to an indifferent jetty. Each turn

of the tide floats the possibility

of  tugging at  knots, splintering restraint,

waking the devil in the engine room

and sailing away, prow-high, sea-skimmed, poles

apart, adrift on oceans of old  freedoms

far from this haven, this creek that curves

its protective arm across the marsh,

frames the watercolour pastoral, clasps

the landscape  to its breast, keeps it grounded,

ballast for the arc of painterly sky.

So they stay:  live  by the moon’s rules, await  

the ebb, then nudge and nuzzle on the swell,

creaking joints clinker to clinker, dancing

on owl-blessed nights, cheek to salt-skinned cheek,

to the wind-whipped gamelan of windlass

and spinnaker tinkled by yachts and cruisers

at smarter addresses along the water;  

spend  days in genuflection to the joys

of oystercatcher  mornings, worshippers

in a church lined with eelgrass and samphire,

sprayed with incense of gull and bladderwrack,

pray for the succour of sinking slowly

into the mud’s embrace, going nowhere,

moored together until the final flood.

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I know my aureate plumage, my crimson wattle, my plentiful harem;

I know the earth, the trail, the forest, the pale;

I know my tail’s sweep compasses command of all

the grasses and spinneys in the known world;

I know I am a game bird, plucky and lucky;

I know grain, seeds, berries, insects, cover, survival;

I know I am East and West;

I know I am sanctified by evolution’s pecking order;

I know I am cock of the walk in the strut and scuttle of history;

I know this field of the cloth of gold is paradise.

And yet I know I can doubt all that surrounds me, as if deceived

by some malevolent woodsprite: sweet scent of stinkhorn,

poppies that bleed on summer fields,

purple bells of heather that colour my view,

artesian well, Cartesian method.

But I know a priori that I am undeceived,

that when I kick the beetle I refute the skeptic,

for I know my perceptions are guaranteed by God almighty

Rover of the Land, Shogun of the Mitsubishi

(praise be to Him in his quadruple nature,       

let His four be by four, as I am humble two by two)  

Amen.

I know there can exist no being more perfect

than He who daily delivers my grain,

who in His wisdom brings me my trusted servants –

nodding imbecile stilt-legs in green boots with yowling companions –

who come to worship my raiment

and keep me plump and sleek and deserving.

But I can never know the Big Bang that ends all things.

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