Dear Readers, concept of Time has bewildered our ancient sages, philosophers, poets, artists,  including our famous scientists and physicists even to this day. It has no doubt also impacted my    
mind in several ways! Therefore, this series about the ‘Enigma of Time In Verse’ is now being composed and posted to share my thoughts with my Poet friends on this Site. If you like it kindly re-post this poem. Thanking You, - Raj Nandy from New Delhi.
             

   THE ENIGMA OF TIME IN VERSE : PART ONE
                           BY RAJ NANDY

                 A  SHORT  INTRODUCTION

During my childhood days, time appeared to be joyful and endless.
Though my parents had observed the clock all the while,
Telling me when to rise, when to eat, play, do my homework, -
till it was my bed time.
Alas, my childhood days as cherished memories are now left behind.
With rest of the world  I am now chasing that winged arrow of Time!

Those Management Gurus say, that our twenty four hours day,
Is time enough for those who can manage time from day to day.
Yet I do find, that I am generally chasing time, not to be left behind!
Hoping that a full time job will provide, some quality time, with the desired comforts of life.
Therefore, I abide my time, hoping to have the time of my life one day, with some quality time coming my way.
But in this mad race against time, while chasing that butterfly of happiness,
I must learn to cool down and breathe, before time decides to elude me!
For with patience and perseverance, that butterfly of happiness, will alight gently on my shoulder in good time, and perhaps at
the right time!
While time is universally regarded as the fourth dimension by our physicists,
It is said to flow at different rates for different individuals as mentioned by Shakespeare the English dramatist.

          FEW  LITERARY  QUOTES  ABOUT  TIME

In ‘As You Like It’ Act 3, Shakespeare refers to ‘the swift steps’ and the ‘lazy foot’of time  in a relativistic way.
Time ‘trots’ for a young woman between her engagement and marriage when a week feels like seven years for her every day!
Time ‘ambles’ for a priest who doesn’t know Latin and a rich man without gout;
Since the priest is spared the burden of exhausting study, and the rich man is spared the burden of exhausting poverty - no doubt.
But time ‘gallops’ for a thief walking to the gallows, for even if he walks slowly, he happens to gets there too soon!
While time ‘stands still’ for lawyers on vacation, since he sleeps his holidays away!

Now moving forward to Einstein who once described his ‘Theory of Relativity’ very humorously in the following way; -
“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it’s two hours,” he had said with a chuckle!

Getting back to Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ Act One on that blasted heath,
Macbeth asks the three witches, “If you can look into the seeds of Time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not,
Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear…”
And finally that brilliant piece of soliloquy about Time by Macbeth in Act 5:
“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
  To the last syllable of recorded time,
  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
  The way to dusty death….”

John Milton’s poem ‘On Time’ composed in 1930 ends with his optimistic lines:
“Fly envious Time, till thou run out thy race,
  Call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours,
  Whose speed is but the heavy Plummets pace …..
  When once our heavenly-guided soul shall clime,
  Then all this Earthly grossness quit,
  Attired with Stars, we shall forever sit
  Triumphing over Death and Chance, and thee O Time.”

Alexander Pope in his ‘Imitations of Horace’ (1738) writes:
“Years following years steal something every day,
  At last they steal us from ourselves away.”
Romantic poets have dealt with the transience of time, which got popularised by the Latin phrase ‘Carpe diem’ which tells us to ‘seize the day’;
This Latin phrase has been borrowed from the Roman lyrical poet Horace of ancient days.

Charles Dickens’ novel ‘Hard Times’ is an autobiography describing his difficult childhood days.
While the famous opening lines of his historical novel ‘A Tale of Two Cites’ take us back to 18th century London and Paris under times sway.
I quote Dickens’ memorable opening lines:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us ......”

We have the Nobel Laureate Tagore’s well known poetic lines on the subject of Time:
“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”
“Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of leaf.”
He described the Taj Mahal as “a tear drop on the cheek of Time,” in his unique poetic style!

TS Eliot’s ‘Four Quarters’ of 1935,  include extended rumination on the nature of Time:
“Time present and time past,
  Are both perhaps present in time future.
  And time future contained in time past.
  If all time is eternally present,
  All time is unredeemable.
  What might have been is an abstraction
  Remaining a perpetual possibility,
  Only in a world of speculation….”
(Notes: This concept will become clearer in my Part Two, presently under construction.)

Next I have a quote from WH Auden’s poem ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’composed in 1937:
“But all the clocks in the city
  Began to whirr and chime:
  O let not Time deceive you.
  You cannot conquer Time.”

Subject of Time forms an important part of science fiction even to this day.
HG Well’s ‘The Time Machine’ (1895) interests both the layman and the Scientific community even today!
Finally, I would like to conclude my Part One on ‘The Enigma of Time in Verse’ with my favourite poem composed by the British poet Ralph Hodgson:
  
TIME, you old gipsy man,
  Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
  Just for one day?
  
All things I'll give you
Will you be my guest,
Bells for your jennet
Of silver the best,
Goldsmiths shall beat you
A great golden ring,
Peacocks shall bow to you,
Little boys sing,
Oh, and sweet girls will
Festoon you with may.
Time, you old gipsy,
Why hasten away?
  
Last week in Babylon,
Last night in Rome,
Morning, and in the crush
Under Paul's dome;
Under Paul's dial
You tighten your rein—
Only a moment,
And off once again;
Off to some city
Now blind in the womb,
Off to another
Ere that's in the tomb.
  
Time, you old gipsy man,
  Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
  Just for one day.

In Part Two I shall cover the Concepts of Time along with its Philosophical speculations.
Before moving on to Einstein’s concept of Time, and its present Scientific interpretations.
Thanks for reading patiently, from Raj Nandy of New Delhi.

If there should ever come a day
when the heavens should file for bankruptcy
and the stars pack up and walk away,

know you no longer have reason to stay
and watch the waves abandon the sea.
If there should ever come a day

when gravity breaks down, losing it's way,
and molecular bonds begin to disagree,
let the stars pack up and walk away.

If mathematics come undone and run astray,
break the last abacus and then decree:
"If there should come a day and that day is today!"

If and when it comes leave Earth in disarray,
disassemble each and every tree,
tell the stars, "Pack up and walk away."

Call up all the physicists and say,
"Discontinue paying your A.P.S. fee"
if there should ever come a day
when the stars pack up and walk away.

The bullet flew so quickly from the pistol it felt like the blood in my veins stopped for a moment
As if quantum physics were just a mere myth
Of random laws and physicists
Each individual cell and atom in my body stopped and rushed to abyss

Thump, thump.

As the bullet reached the end of your skull, I swore I died instead of you
But instead of dying and leaving the realm of the living I enter bliss and happiness

Flowers scattered over bright green grass for miles,
Soft and whispering wind rushed past my freckled skin
The trees swayed with the wind
It brought an epitome of perfection, only your carcass brought death and decay

Snapping back to reality, your eyes rolled back, and your jaw opened wide
I wanted to tear it open, to give you a somewhat permanent evil smile
Your body hit the ground so hard, the sound vibrated across my body, giving my heart the ability to beat normally again
You looked so peaceful for a mere moment
I swore I could have kissed you even though I despise your very being

Your skin quickly went colorless, and you laid there so still
I burst into panicked laughter, and covered my filthy mouth
It was definitely rude to laugh at someone's death

My stomach growls, and my hands shake with satisfaction
I've finally done it. I killed my insecurities

After a short moment of freedom and what seemed to be like genuine tears of joy...
Your eyes roll back to normal, and they focus me closely
Rising from the ground, you flick your hair back as if the wind blew it out of place
You fix your shirt, as if the blood stains weren't there

"It's so silly to think you could get rid of me so easily," you say.

I'm never going to feel alive ever again

My encounter, although mistakingly enlightening
Leaves me more baffled than before.
Do my words inherit the glow, similar to my daydreaming movements?
As if they were prematurely made, a banner across my silhouette.
Attached before the words can escape my mouth.

I wonder tonight about the necessity of freedom of speech
Curious to understand the rate of which our minds have developed, or been manipulated.
Is it our human defect of guilt the thing that encourages us to open our mouths?
Merely to humor our lowly human selves.

But I fumble
As words escape my lips, and enter your mind,they cannot be translated.
You cannot read my genuine emotion, as the life and purpose is ****** out as they are inscribed across your palm
So I write, and I materialize these things before they are evaporated.

Yes, I am confusing, and I apologize if I am further misunderstood
But, , my friend, I do love you
Purely, true and eternally
Yet I cannot give you what you desire.

Newton was both right and wrong
Love cannot be created nor destroyed
This energy flows continuously, passed from friend to friend
youthfully and innocently as friendship is meant to be

But, what he did not consider was the love of truth and purity
Which in the end is no energy, as they would have us believe
This love is an essence, similar to that formed the blood flowing through our family
Yet has something more

This love I speak honestly of,
Is unselfish
Is no medal of achievement
It bestows upon you the drive to be the highest you
It is the essence for the creation  of the one thing that they can never offer
True love, and true love of yourself.

Physicists are perverts. They keep
trying to peek under Mother
Nature's dressing gown- asking
Her questions like "why
do electrons behave as both
particles and waves?"
when what they really want
to know is

if Mother Nature's lingerie
is red or black, and which
she prefers to wear
on Fridays.

<•>

Good Acts are like Good Poems

"Good acts are like good poems.
One may easily get their drift,
but they are not rationally understood"
Albert  Einstein

Ach, mein guter Kumpel!
Ach, mein bester Freund!

how could I not have known,
the syncopation, the synchronization,
between what I write, and the impetuous impetus within,
that caustic sense that burns words
from my chest
directly onto the paper
are more than correlated,
even causation-ally related
after all, you, naturally, the master of relativity

but you know me Al,^
I, the quibbler from  NYC*
have to have a slightly different take,
in my gemeinschaft city of eight million strangers,
we always must have eight million and one
opinions

true dat, when I am on the fifth or sixth stanza,
realizing got no clue what the poem is rambling about,
but it sounds so good, lovely, pretty words,
why ***** it up with scientific rationality?

but good acts are easy, uber understood,
rationally we live to survive and
do what we to
make the species survive, common sense triumphs,
disguised as sacrifice, forgetting to roll the dice,
doing what comes like a good poem,
and what needs doing or writing
is so intuitively obvious,
just love poetry,
a global necessity

so check out Houston in two thousand and seventeen

here's hoping life in heaven ain't boring  
know that you've seen, peeked, peaked,
at the theory of everything,

resolving the contradictions
between general laws of physics
and those pesky tiny quantum mechanicals,
even solving that 'other' equation

GA = GP

the ashes of ancient
alchemical martyrs glow
in the great tunnels
of Hadron, whizzing
faster than time
at the behest of man,
the measurer of all things
including whether things
are worth measuring or not

a sordid joke on the great minds
that sorted the mystery out
long before quantum physicists
crawled out from under
the church’s labyrinth
of insulting confabulations
and pillaged the fortunes of others
to build the great rings

shall we bow to the new God?
**** your experience, I’ll prove you wrong
He bellows from the podium built from
the finest endangered trees
and polished with the spit of
all who disagree, and yet

it’s truth in action
the 9mm’s omniscient song
sung across this suffering world:
***** with me, and you’ll discover the truth

Museums as art
Art as museums
Sail the trail to my mausoleum
Psychopaths and physicists
Psychiatrists and philosophers
Philanthropists and pilots and painters


Declare now, that these are our days –
Our hours, and our days
These are our city, our hours
Our time, our days.


This is our world –
At 14:92 I landed here and claimed it
And searched it and found it wanting
Of civilization that I could so easily supply
By means of wounds and iron
And brawn and truth
(and just a tiny touch of influenza darling)
By means of our Lord,
Who grants us all that we desire
If only we **** enough of those he did not choose.
This is our world –
And we shall make it what we will
Make it in our own image
Teach it that innocence is not knowing the difference between right and wrong
Raise it to hate no one
But to love itself so deeply
That all other love seems hateful in comparison.
This is our child, love
Yours and mine.


Here the first shall be last
And the last shall be first
But once the first are last they shall be
Last
Last
      Last
And once the last are first
They shall make it so they can never be last again
This is our primitive accumulation
Of necessary materialism
Let’s cultivate matter
To make objects that we can place on shelves
And in cases –
These are our cases
And we love them as we love ourselves


Museums as mass graves
Mass graves as museums
Kiss me in my mausoleum
Priests and prisoners
Prostitutes and prophets
Pioneers and pilgrims and pagans


This is our time –
And we are dispensing it in spendthrift increments
Buying threadbare bandages for our cavernous canyons
Buying ample earplugs
To seal in the silence
So we can somewhat say
“look there is peace –
Look we have done it
In our time it is accomplished” – 


This is our peace –
And we know it by the signs
The lions and lambs lay quietly together
In our brass-barred zoos
For as long as shelves and cases
Are intact and the first are first
And the last are last
And the civilized are organized and holy
There is peace –
Oh, look
We made peace!

And as for Solomon and Socrates –
We take their words to weave through our new wisdom
And when we re-chart the constellations
We shall give them each a star
And salute them once a year
When they come around the universe
Oh, look
How wise we are!

Mass graves as art
Art as mass graves
There have been no better days
There has been no greater time
Politicians and pornographers
Professors and pirates
Psychologists and pastors and pianists


This is our time –
And we are doing with it the very best we know how
The last are toiling and trying
And the first are trying to think to try –
But there is a shortness in our hours
And a violence in our peace
There is inherent foolishness in our wisdom
And disease in our cities
And there is death upon our shelves and in our cases.

This is our world –
We crafted it and declared our truth to be true
We sculpted this, our colosseum
Please inscribe my mausoleum
With “we know not what we do”

Some people say they don't like social networking
on mobile phones,
"it distances us from human connection"
they bleat and moan,
"takes us away from natural converging,
curtails face to face ties from emerging,
subdues us in a swamp of technology,
this engagement with messaging is surely a folly."
And as they depart they say,
“give me a person over a mobile msg anyday.”
Now don't get me wrong eye to eye communing is amazing
and it's not the last reserve of a luddite to prefer tactile phrasing
or to think sweet nothings into a there ear is best
but that doesn't mean there is nothing in mobile caress.
Because you can meet someone at a festival, and feel a sweet spark
that thunders through the roaming larks
and then when you part after a few days
think, "oh, that was awesome, I enjoyed their ways,
they made me laugh and gave me jumping smiles,
****, it's a pity between us there are miles and miles."
But when you arrive home and charged up a message pings
"you back now?" I see it and start to feel sing.
So we take our phones and chat all the next day,
getting to know each other in a happy appy way,
giggling at your words, beaming at the next
growing through lightning at each little text,
learning more in these screen chats;
you go to lots of BBQs and love dogs and cats,
you dye your hair and are calamity stricken
your top fajitas are finger lickin,
you know Mandarin and are ace at Catchphrase
and you have an inclination for New York days,  
you can analytically discuss scenes from C Street,
you can charm the customers at a store meet and greet,
you can decipher the nuance in The Bistro goss,
you can put up with **** from ****** at Argos.
You have a mate who picks up Mark Ronson's pooch,
you've saved a big crustacean when been on a mooch,
you can relate a song to Odysseus using sheep to save his men
and watch Mr G the musical over and over again,
you stay up/get up to watch the Super Bowl,
you type faster than a thought on a roll,
you've danced with Pete Barlow's ship mate from Corrie,
you can drive a car and a van, I recks you could handle a lorry!
You have loads of friends and often verge on more dislocation,
I want to be near you, whatever the location.
I want to pull you out of a hat
and see you stand on my welcome mat,
see, mobiles are good because it's good to feel that.
But if some quantum physicists are to be believed, after perusing their hefty tomes,
somewhere in infinite there is a place with no mobile phones,
and a boom of synchronicity has to be carried on by pen on paper
and there are days and days tween a tumbling heebie jeebie butterfly caper,
and then it's sent with a hope that it won't be lost in the post,
and be not read, like a bottled message uncorked by the coast.
Maybe a letter and no phones is better for starting a fizz
but right now mobiles make this what it is;
if not for them would I feel this close to you?
Or be writing this to you?
Right now I like feeling close to you,
and I like writing this to you,
to you Lou.

We slump on the couch when we return like lifetimes
have passed before us.
We have to, even though it was only a seven minute walk
to the dining hall, because 1) the food was just
“weird consistency”
(which we tend to say regardless), 2) the light
in there yawned indifferently to us (when does it not?), and
3) the reassuring clink of our forks on our
plates wasn’t even there this time it was
hiding underneath slop
and smothered on top by the intruding sound waves
(who asked?)
of our next-table neighbors’ lives.

You made a sly remark about seconds to catch
a glimpse of youthful ****.
She’d gone to get some more baby carrots and cucumber slices
to put in her salad maybe
(who knows? who cares?)
Either way, her youthful **** would make the food taste like
something to you. And you
described them to us when you sat down again so
the slop would taste like something to us
(there’s pride in that type of generosity, don’t forget) and

(congratulations)

we had the faint impression of
some sort of
****** there, but

we didn’t tell you
(it’s easier that way).

A cup, a squeeze, a kiss on her ******* yes that could feed
our hunger for a night. And tonight was a night
like any, so her ******* led us to talk

of women, and women led us to talk of
love
(and the blooming one for the poor *******)
as we who lost withstood the vicarious twinge of
an addling ****** very different from
the first.

This one led us to pine for sweets, but the ones we found
were dry, so we left the table, left the dining hall, looking around at
the others: the lonely, the couples, the blessed
lonely couples, and the fortunate friends
huddled against everything with open laughter, enjoying
the weird consistency like drunk theoretical physicists before
they discovered bubbles and inflated eternally meaning
when they safeguarded a
zoo with a pistol they didn’t know how to
use, in Soviet Russia.

(So you see?) We have to slump on the couch
when we return like lifetimes  
have passed before us.
No one even bothers to pick up a guitar, we leave all four of them
strewn on the floor like
dead wooden boxes because
Dylan or Young or Cash (or whoever)
is already in the living
room. Any
bubbling, inflating, theoretical physicist
(any drunk, pistol-packing zookeeper, for that matter) will
tell you that.

So we slump, comfortably uncomfortable,
(at least we’re trying!)
feeling their (our) strings plucking. No sounds, no voices.
Because we don’t need
to hear this that.
Not right
now. (Not right
now).

Light waves, frequencies, and distorted thoughts. Aligned with misperceptions. Auras tainted with beings of another stage. My duality cracks into a million faces. Astral physicists of higher realms. Who needs a doctor when you have perfectly good shamans? Green monsters, unseen to the naked eye. I remain broken as twisted images carry me along the sea of paranoia.

Struck with the realization of existentialism.
Found the secret to the universe.
Found the cosmic codex then erased it.

Struck with the sudden fury of a divine messenger.
Understood the duality of good and evil.
Recorded the universe of knowledge then misplaced it.

Struck with a wave of indecision.
Solved theoretical physicists struggle with time travel.
Caught the speed of light and then outpaced it.

Struck with the spear of a fallen angel.
Found the devil in my dreams.
Became his nightmare and replaced it.

embezzle the grey matter underneath a skull overladen with pintrest pins dotted sideways like impact-starsfallen bricks flowers plummet vase-first onto concrete side-world beyond the gardener's balconyit always takes an angry peasant to make the peasants into serfslike a bleeding riddle in granite or grass, left to rushed interpretation as the meta-physicists usurp the physicists authority and insist the earth is speaking to avoid a hemorrhaging final trimester in the birth of human omnipotenceinstead Mother Nature asks Dr. Neptune for an abortion in the final trimesterDr. Neptune politely declines and returns to Sean Hannity in the Situation Room__how dry is a planet where it never, ever rains?

When I was little, my stepfather and I would be outside, coloring the driveway with chalk or throwing a frisbee and he’d stop and say, “I’m gonna go stir your mama up.”

He’d go in the house, coming out minutes later with my mom hot on his heels, waving her arms and haranguing his retreating back. She couldn’t see the big grin on his face as he approached me, “It’s good for her heart,” he’d say, chuckling and resuming whatever we were doing, “We’ve got to keep her on her toes.” He’s a master of dolorous mischief.

Flash forward to a cold, dark, Yale, winter evening in 2023. Peter and I are in the suite’s common room. Four dorm rooms share this ‘living room’ area but we’re alone, which was rare.

I’d been reading for about an hour and I was only half done. A chemistry PSet was next. I closed my Chinese language studies book and looked up. Peter was there, sitting on the floor, leaning back on the far end of the red corduroy couch where I was sitting. His long lanky frame was curled around the book he was reading, like an awkward python.

As I watched, he plucked a mint-chocolate milkshake off the white coffee table, bringing the straw to his lips without ever taking his eyes off his book. Homework, homework, homework.
I was bored and wanted a little attention, a little fun.

“Was I your first choice?” I asked him, as he noisily slurped at the last of his milkshake.
“First choice for what?” He asked.
“To be your girlfriend,” I clarified, emphasizing the last word.

He thought for a moment, “No, I had salty love-jones for Ivy Waters in second grade. Why?”
“I don’t know, It just occurred to me to ask,” I confided. “so, why did you choose me then?”
“Well,” he said, raising his eyebrows in all, fake sincerity, “you know all the best jokes,” and with that, he went back to his milkshake (argh!).

“I know, you’re finishing your doctorate,” I said, “but you could be a flight attendant!”
Peter stopped trying to stir the last of his milkshake into a slurpable lump and froze in thought. “It’s TRUE,” I continued, “Really - you need to be flexible in your planning. I read that most physicists slave away in povertude.”

“Povertude, huh?’ He said, and resumed his mint-chocolate work - his straw making a loud “ssssuuuuusssssskkkkkkkkkk,” empty-cup air-******* sound.
“AI isn’t going to replace **** flight attendants,” I offered, as my last argument in the matter.

After a moment he asked, “You really think I could carry it off?” Putting his palm on his hip and wiggling his shoulders in a provocative shimmy.

“I KNEW you’d leave me at the FIRST opportunity,” I said, turning sharply away, pretending to ignore him - the universal cap of girlfriends everywhere - with a condensed absence of attention that, I hoped, spoke unspoken things.

Setting his milkshake down, he gave me a lecherous smile, which made me giggle, and began crawling in my direction.

“Eeek!” I shrieked, laughing, as he climbed up on the couch, “I still have homework!”

I always wanted to compose symphonies,
But my hands and my head could never agree.
I got the blue curse, because I always feel beats,
But my fingers freeze up when I get to melo-DIEs.
Recede. I want to live the nihilist's dream,
Smoke packs a day to intensify screams.
Maybe if I stare into the middle distance,
After hours I would build up a tolerance to listen.

IN THIS town, there are only 2 kinds of people
Girls who pierce their NOSES and THOSE IN the steeple
Walking down So. Auburn in bare feet and short shorts
Catching the gleam from the street (of course),
With their dreadlocks all up in auburn buns
And their eyes shooting diamonds in the autumn sun.
Bullet-belt vests draped lazily over their shoulders,
With double-zero earrings and squirt-gun holsters.

And the police-dogs and the SWAT cars are all powered by indulgence,
The doctors are up to their elbows in cadavers by self-expulsion
The men are splitting at the seams from over-eating obsessive compulsion
And the shameful deception of upward inflection to change my direction and wind
UP and the inanimate DUCKling with a large crank between its shoulders
In the shape of a black key to the black energy that makes the cold rooms colder
Is a disguise to the spoken word hurricanes brewing inside me.
Set me to zero then make me the hero so physicists can derive me.

If the sum of all forces is equal to mass times acceleration,
Maybe the sum of world problems is equal to vanity times irritation.
Jeans cutting up my legs, purpling due to lack of circulation
Are developing holes, as well as the soles of my shoes, I'm growing impatient.
The production slows to a halt, pouring salt into lacerations,
And as boys grow into drunk daddies, women resort to migration.
This country isn't democracy, just a ghastly and pale imitation,
These people don't have representatives, only half-assed representations.

Physicists believe this dimension
may be nothing more than a hologram

But they have not run their fingertips
down the curve of your back

Scientists researching nature and man,
sing, Muse Kalliope, about arcane progress
of inventive magicians, wizards, druids,
philosophers, alchemists, and physicists,
bright curious people who study our world
and organize knowledge in holy books
to record wisdom gleaned by supple minds
as they experiment on sacred quest
to discover truth and invent better ways
we perform tasks to rule civilization
that programs actions of each crafting hand.
While Homeros once sang of manic rage
and versatile wiles, Hesiodos of gods,
Valmiki of loyal love, Vyasa of conflict,
Lucretius of atoms, Vergilius of arms,
Ovidius of bodies transforming shapes,
Ferdowsi of wisdom and civilization,
Dante of punishment and search for faith,
Chaucer of lust and fierce desire to live,
Ariosto of chaos, Tasso of order,
Camoens of discovery, Spenser of virtues,
Shakespeare of outrage at horror of death,
and Milton of paradise lost and found,
I, Surazeus, inspired by Muses sing
of philosophy, science, and inventions
when curious men and women observe nature
and seek to comprehend physical laws
that govern vital scheme of evolution
transforming matter of swirling universe
in galaxies, stars, planets, and conscious life.
Why are heroes in ancient tales poets sing
warriors who fight and **** in brutal wars,
biggest, strongest, meanest, and wiliest men
who wield weapons of death, and crown themselves
god-kings, then claim divine right to rule lands?
Ten thousand years men argued and fought wars,
joining groups lead by men who organize
gangs to battle for control over land,
following men with loyal obedience
who comprehend best how rich nature works,
and perceive future possible events
when they analyze situations well
and build strong forts for well-trained warriors
to occupy strategic points on hills
that guard close fresh-water rivers and lakes.
Warriors who founded dynasties of kings
play grand roles of power on martial stage
of history, killing tyrants and thieves,
and decree rules that foster common good
to stabilize smooth social interactions
between groups, manage prosperous production
of commercial enterprise on lush farms,
and support design of religious art
in songs and plays that relate noble deeds
of great hero who founded nation state.
Yet every great hero king, mortal man
who inhabits body of flesh and blood
like us, grows old, dies, and crumbles to dust,
and power of his personal authority
dissolves in wind that howls in empty halls,
and all his grand Ozymandian boasts
echo dumb over waste land of his works.
New generations rise who fight again,
arrayed and lead by power-hungry kings
to impose their world view on other groups,
and millions die in brutal fights for power
in endless cycles of destructive wars,
so fighters fail to provide secure way
that constructs stable secure social state
where all individuals prosper and thrive
pursuing personal dreams for happiness.
While warriors fought each other for power
and fame, to play gods on stage of history,
humble men and women, seeking solutions
to solve problems, discovered sacred laws
of nature, and expressed visions of life
to state concepts that explain how things work.
While mad warriors destroy to gain control,
wise philosophers and genius scientists
ask questions, conduct research, observe nature,
state hypotheses, conduct experiments,
analyze data, and develop theories
to describe how our universe operates,
created in process of cause and effect.
While warriors destroy, scientists create
better ways to comprehend and describe
complex universe that nourishes our souls,
so clever thinkers and builders through time,
who search for truth beyond outdated modes
of linguistic models, and build world views
that assist people struggling to survive
by providing accurate facts about life,
are true heroes who build civilization.
Nations base myths of their right to exist
on founding fathers, empires on bold kings
who ****, and religions on peaceful prophets
who teach social rules of moral behavior,
while science builds theories of observed facts
on exact research of philosophers
and scientists into true nature of things.
I sing of scientists, who observe nature
and develop clear theories to describe
how our universe works, rather than warriors
who fight and ****, because their honest work
constructs Temple of Truth secure on facts
which shelters us from storm of social chaos,
preserving peace inside strong garden walls.

We have this set of ideals
We wish to follow in life
Like science has its ideal gas laws
And chemical balances they wish to succeed
So do we
We wish to be like an ideal Gas
Although every physicist knows it cannot be
Every gas strives for this
Like us
We say
"on my wedding day, I'll..."
"I'll name my child..."
"When I'm rich, I'll..."
We have these ideals
This set of rules each of us wishes to achieve
Because it's a chronological set we're supposed to achieve
We have this plan
And when life visualises our plan,
She scoffs and laughs
Ha
Ha
You dare think
You can control me?
With your stupid ideals
That don't exist
Tragic
You are not an ideal gas
You play by my rules...
And she takes our page
Our artistic scribbles and childish naive hearts around the page
And she rips it...
But not right down the middle... No no...
She tears slowly...
Destroying every little dream one at a time
She takes a black marker
And she foils our plans
Ever so slightly
Oh but she manipulates our dream

I can never be an ideal gas, can I, life?
You're much too harsh to allow me that
Small wish.