Remain calm the mayor intones
As he blesses the congregants with a shaving brush
Besprinkling them with Gilbey’s gin
And they depart with a newfound sense
Of tribal acceptance and grudges relinquished
Soon the univalves arrive to collect the residue
Chanting in their impossible bass-baritone
Hoo loo hoo leh loo lah
Sleep little wormlings
Fear not your early liquefaction
For the alcohol has performed its antiseptic purpose
And the rasping teeth achieve too
Their saprophytic effect
And the snails are presently joined
By a few brave brittle stars
Who have quitted their accustomed habitations
Of submarine castle
And petrific garden
And rococo monastery
And their piping treble joins molluscan chant
In festive obligato
Echinodermata true leviathans
Who drench all space in uncanny duration
So slow and stately is their step

But the humans have hustled away
Tormented by past and future alike
The agony of their own fictions
The lurid tiger in the forest
The tiger in very hallway
Not that the counterfacts
Betray an avoidable error
But simply that the vertebrates
Upright in soul and body
Depend upon contrivance
As a sunflower upon sunlight
A dependency inscribed in their bones
They do not devour the soil
Like exotic earthworms
But lay brick upon clay brick
Or burrow beneath the avenue
To lay fiber-optic cable
And having invented sequence
They struggle to fit duration
Into the branching labyrinth
And weep inconsolably
And remorsefully
Having forgotten how to regenerate
Their severed limbs