Life is simple. Thought is dull. Every cup is always full.

A world's worth of smoldering stars are hibernal seen from afar.

Love is petty. Grief is stale. What mean they in the final tale?

Guilt's as dire a fault as trust.

Unthwartable, the revenge of dust.

The fire's put out, the ashes cleaned, Ra sunken in the ravine

To return to his office duly with the banal morrow.

"Come, see the jungle's flower—bathed by the light tower,

Come offer your fruits and wine

In blind mockery of the divine."

To arms, ye poor and jaded men! Toil ye through storm and fen!

All fall in the mighty Harvest, be the field won or run.

But none, none among them, may gaze at the glass bedewed

With cloying red rubies, and say:

I have ever lived a day.

Change will wither, and bow, and age. Man remains infallibly tame.

The tide's song away from shore seems a pitiful, torpid roar.

Falling leaves and paper sheaves swim through smoke-stacks' ashen reefs.

Order is a clement lord;

Obeyed is his surest sword.

Eyes will lie. Storms will tire. Gilded faults escape Versailles.

The heathen whispers of the crude are shared by the great and shrewd.

In the dark room, does not every fleeting fancy inscribe a tomb?

Chained by maudlin zeal, you

Forget which Janus-face is real.

Cloaked processions set the carillons rattling tiredly in their shawls.

The fleeing man's abject plight is bathed in pale illusions' light.

A life is but a fleck of coal; its end takes naught from the whole.

To the hero of this rhyme:

Fear the intrinsic friction of time.