Another Day in Another Year in a Remarkably Similar Universe

Surprise, surprise, periodicity

Is costly—the more accurate the clock,

The greater the entropy in its wake.

Accurate, accurate—define for us

Accurate. A clock is a flow meter

For entropy. Periodicity

Is the metric. Periodicity

More perfect is therefore more accurate,

And it seems you’re back to wheels within wheels,

Once again, stacked circles as the divine

Measure, stacked so that each one ticks the same,

The perfect circuit, the perfect return,

As if you cut a hole in the cosmos

And every moment that passed through that hole

As wave of change changed exactly the same.

An ideal clock would burn an infinite

Energy and produce an infinite

Entropy, and thus for yet another

Round you’ve found the ideal can’t possibly

Be. It’s modular, this philosophy,

Its end its beginning, to coin a phrase.

Atom undergoing excitations

And decays, more and more regularly,

More and more entropy, like any soul

Approaching pure divinity, any

Approximation singing in its chains

Of limitation, approaches the same.

Perfection would be the perfect sameness

Of two distinct things—moments, circles, waves—

But there can be no twoness that’s sameness,

No clock without periodicity

Imperfect enough to contain some change,

And nothing’s the same without that least change.