Remembering that Einstein had Problems with Time. (Revised)

I love the sound of my little clock
Ticking quietly in the corner,
An electronic heartbeat driving the world
To a strict metallic rhythm.
But I do not believe the news it bleeps precisely
On every passing hour, half hour and quarter,
Because the world is not a man made thing,
A compound mechanism or a smart computer,
And cannot be perfectly kept in order
Like a game of chess or the factory floor,
Or a smooth running Daimler guzzling oil.

Time is an indeterminate strange thing,
Different for every culture; each man, each woman;
And every creature that sleeps upon the Earth.
The butterfly thinks it has lived forever,
As does the bumble bee, gazelle or camel,
The half blind infant born this very night.
And aging folk ignore the final bell
While they sit in groups around the bar room table
To tell the stories that they always tell
Because their childhoods` glow in fiercer light.
I personally prefer the instincts of the Roma,
Awake at dawn, then swift to bed under the flight of Sirius
In bowtop wagons where timeless dreams are born,
And the future seems rock solid, not mysterious.

The rule of the clock is a mere sad waste of ticking,
Except sometimes for the comfort it may bring
To the long fraught hours of sporadic, fitful sleeping,
When the pummeled eye of dawn is far too raw to open,
And the larks too cold to sing.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 9th. - June 3rd. - 4th. 2016.

The title of this poem recalls Einstein`s belief in a steady state universe against all the evidence of his on exemplary calculations.