Chapultepec Park is a fashion of Versailles.
Mexico City, seen by an aztec eye,
Would be a chimera, only geographically grafted
Upon the solid past, unstably if stolidly draughted —
Otherwise as off the map as a ring of Saturn,
If not more so, in its incongruous pattern.
Similarly a flight of Fokkers, Vickers and Spads
Would have looked caddish (built for us wingless cads)
To a frigate-bird above Columbus' poop,
Or one shadowing Pizarro's pirate sloop
Off Tumbez, hurrying to investigate
The Inca's prodigality of plate.

Therefore: " The course is timewards"! I exclaim.
" Timewards she is!" you echo. Spanish Main
Of our time-travel promises no gold,
What matter though? Mercurial and bold
We find a New Land, a lost Lyonesse
At every breathless daybreak, more or less.
With trowel and vasculum we swiftly land,
Theodolites cut up the mystery-strand:
Then pulling up the hook, we speed away,
Shooting the sun (and stars) as best we may:
Log-glass and line inform us of our place,
And so, drunk with the New, we gladly race
Upon fresh spectacles, risen overnight,

Exclaim with me: " Oh World, oh Life, oh Time !"
And make each thought with busy body rhyme!
Let us within the Van of Progress sit,
And make indeed a bright outing of it —
(Not crossing a single frontier, for that's lese
Majeste, of the Majesty that stays
Himself no way at home — because he has
In fact no home, ubiquitous as jazz).
But all the same — a system that's at rest —
In spite of that we'll do our level best,
In pottering round our own backdoor show those
Who move more freely, that we freely chose

But how can the mathematics of the stars
Concern the issue of class against class?
Do homo sapiens and the citizen
Affect each other in that shrewd way then —
So that to advertize as cheap as dirt
The former, must the latter's prospects hurt?
Can you drive better bargains with our sex
After dosing it with a " little man" complex?
Can Time, a metaphysical concept,
Play any part within the marxist sept —
Time seen as " the soul of Space" — hailed as a god —
Does that affect the average voter's lot? —
Naif and natural such query is,

Where I join issue, as Fleet Street would say,
Is really on account of you, One-Way!
Your onewayness is threatened, that's the fact!
At least it's tampered with. You'll be debacked
If you're not very careful! And your " will",
Why that's wiped out entirely. When you kill
Or steal or whatnot, why no " will" precedes
The act. You hunger as a Robot feeds!
But this is very bad! It's worse than that —
They'll have you yet, or I will eat my hat!
Truffles you are to them, cheap truffles too.
I cannot think as yet what's best to do.

In my best Boileau always, I will pass
Into the clock-work labyrinths of glass,
Where etherwinds in infra-red timespaces
Impart a sickly pallor to our faces. —
Important as are powerstations, the clock
Is more so. Esto Memor! Sedate tick-tock!
It's my belief the Master-Clock does hold
The death-warrant of the four-faced time-manifold.
Geometry of postulates pretends
To lean on physical clocks for its own ends:
How easy though to snatch from beneath it all
That gimcrack apparatus, cause it to take a fall!

I will however, in the manner of Boileau,
The massive beams of a great searchlight throw
Upon the clouds of an impending storm,
And make the attempt to charm while I inform. —
For the time-man, then, t might in fact be d .
Should you ignore that fact, you remain at sea —
I speak of the four-dimensional quartette.
The " motion" of old-fashioned " matter" — get
If you can that into the socket where
You kept your mental " time", and leave it there —
Popping " direction" in alongside of it,
Make it a good non-concrete sort of fit.

In any medium except that of verse
Forthwith I could enlighten you. Too terse,
And as it were compact, this form of art —
Which handles the finished product only — the hard
Master-material of selected sound.
The intellect has its workshops underground;
We cannot go back, out of this dance of words,
To become the teacher. Here we behave as birds —
The brain-that-sweats offends , it breaks our spell,
You do see that? we really must not smell
In this r├┤le: it is aristocratic but
Cudgel your brains in this case you must not .

That never! Upon his juju I do spit —
I have torn to shreds his philosophic kit!
I've knocked the shit out of his bogus champs.
I've put out all his wreckers' lying lamps.
Yet in a sense the Time-king's fellow — a sense
There is in which I might be that: My pen's
His trusty instrument, if you by him
Should mean that imitation-timeless limb
Of Satan — then I might consent to join
His masquerade. If the Battle of the Boyne,
Chemin des Dames, Austerlitz, Culloden,
Were all agreed to be as good as one:
And if I were quite certain I could go

And yet I find I care! — But I should not
I'm positive of that, if all were what
It looked to poor Don't-Care and Should-I-Worry .
I hurl myself through Time. The man to hurry
Am I and no mistake-why I'm all that
When neighbours cry You'll never run to fat
The way you live! To trap a word I'm up
At cockcrow, with a book I dine and sup,
My record of the Here and Now to fix
I burn each week a hundred midnight wicks,
Or filaments — I drive as dour a pen
As the first navigators or great mission-men.
All Time is new! You can't take that away