The Wheel Of Life

(on Hugh Everett’s Theory of the Universal Wave Function)

Our Mystery dreamt of a sea

That turned into a library

Each borrower could take a book

But here’s the bit that he mistook

Those reads the critics liked to tout

You’d come and find a page ripped out

Why, even chapters moved elsewhere

Which left no sense in what was there

Now having only one of each

Those shelves left most tales out of reach

How soon this sea-librarian

Turned non-egalitarian

There’s really nowhere to begin

I sense it’s quite a spin we’re in

It’s inside down and upside out

With no way off the roundabout

But who’s the whirler – Time or Me

Am I the train or scenery

Can causeffects and Hope elope

To ride upon the zoetrope?

Let’s leave that ocean as a sea

And seize a possibility

The text becomes more writerly

When superwaves write poetry

For if you can still follow me

The plot must have consistency

To place a story in the verse

There’s just one human universe

And if the logic we extend

We’ll find beginning in the end

Though if we could step out the rhyme

We’d see a rock unchanged by Time