The cutting edge of the knife
It is a beauty and a brilliance
Flashing up in its destructance;
For, everything isn’t here to stay its “best”;
It’s merely there to die in its sublimeness.
Like slow fires making their brands, energy breeds;
Yet, ever consumes and moves on, as more it feeds,
Then spreads forth anew, this unpurposed dispersion,
An inexorable emergence with little reversion,
Ever becoming of its glorious excursions
Through the change that patient time restrains,
And feasting upon the glorious decayed remains,
In its progressive march through losses for gains.
Everything that ever happens,
Including life and all our questions—
Meaning every single event ever gone on
Of both the animate and the non—
Is but from a single theme played upon.
This, then, is of the simplest analysis of all,
For it heeds mainly just one call—
That of the second law’s dispersion,
The means for each and every occasion,
From the closest to the farthest range—
That which makes anything change.
These changes range from the simple,
Such as a bouncing ball resting still
Or ice melting that gives up its chill,
To the more complex, such as digestion,
Growth, death, and even reproduction.
There is excessively subtle change, as well,
Such as the formations of opinions tell
And the creation or rejections of the will.
And, yet, all these kinds of changes, of course,
Still become of one simple, common source,
Which is the underlying collapse into chaos—
The destiny of energy’s unmotivated non-purpose.
All that appears to us to be motive and purpose
Is in fact ultimately motiveless, without purpose;
Even aspirations and their achievement’s ways
Have fed on, and come about through the decay.
The deepest structure of change is but decay;
Although, it’s not the quantity of energy’s say
That causes decay, but the quality, for it strays.
Energy that is localized is potent to effect change,
And, in the course of causing change, it ranges,
Spreading and becoming chaotically distributed,
Losing its quality but never of its quantity rid.
The key to all this, as we will see,
Is that it goes though stages wee,
And so it doesn’t disperse all at once
As might one’s paycheck inside of a month.
This harnessed decay results not only for
Civilizations, but for all the events going fore
In the world and the universe beyond,
It accounting for all discernible change,
Of all that ever gets so rearranged;
For, the quality of all this energy kinged
Declines, the universe unwinding, as a spring.
Chaos may temporarily recede,
Quality building up for a need,
As when cathedrals are built, or forms,
And when symphonies are performed;
But, these are but local deceits,
Born of our own conceits;
For, deeper in the world of kinds
The spring inescapably unwinds,
Driving its energy away—
As ALL is being driven by decay.
The quality of energy meant
Is of its dispersal’s extent.
When it is totally precipitate,
It destroys; but when it’s gait
Is geared through chains of events
It can produce civilization’s tenants.
