The organism dormant
Insensible of a pain
Insupportable
By any conscious being

There is no entelechy
Nor no sublunary purpose
Only the glacial pace
The supra-glacial pace
Of chance operation
Of elemental forces

Why should such a state obtain
Motive implies consciousness
Or at least response
And consequence sequence
Amenable to observation

Rather ask why
The pangolin’s scale
The Fibonacci spiral of an artichoke’s scales
The diatom’s elegant silica
The horn of a giraffe
The snail’s sensitive horn
The implacable drive of a bamboo shoot
The predator
The migration of the prey

All concede universal neutrality
But all have witnessed
Though few perhaps remark the fact
How neutrality is reprehensible