An Evening Discipline

Two ways any will,
Any agency, could be
Sheer ruse and delusions:

Fated or buffeted.
If the former, clamped-down
Life slides along steel rails,

Or doesn’t move at all,
As fixed as a book’s text
For reading, not writing.

If the latter, it’s not
Some predetermined path
Or outcome, but the storms

Prove too much for any
Little willful being
To do much more than shake,

A cell on a lab slide,
A germ in the sea foam,
A human in the waves.

We say the evidence
Favors such buffeting
Hypotheses, although

We seem to have been bashed
About so much out here
We can’t trust these results.