Ben David Trigg

The Grand Scheme of Things.
The Grand Scheme of Things!
Everybody talks about
The Grand Scheme of Things.
As if they’ve read it through and scanned
it page by page to understand
the content and the message of
The Grand Scheme of Things.

‘Everything is fine,’ they say,
Or ‘It’ll turn out right,’ they say,
‘It doesn’t matter,’ – so blasé –
‘in The Grand Scheme of Things.’

But no one really knows what’s in
The Grand Scheme of Things
– those Things with their fangs
and their spectacles and their wings –
No one knows quite what it says
In its pages fine as spider’s web.
For They keep it under lock and key
– those Things all faint and shimmery –
where they live in Sector 53
of a sub-meta-reality
accessible beneath the sea
Where waters flow and ebb.

It’s said that valiant Hercules
in time before Euripides
braved fiercest gales and stormy seas
to find the lair of Things.
But fated not to find it out
he went his days in fear and doubt
and only Homer wrote it out –
perhaps he was a Thing?

It’s said the greatest mysteries
of science, art and history
were written from eternity
by those grandly scheming Things.
While others say they shift like sand
on Thingy whims and sleight of hand
and nothing very much is planned
in The Grand Scheme of Things.

A regular Mister know-it-all
all shiny teeth and Stoical
thought he’d divined it out.
A proper televangelist,
he reckoned he could handle this,
and went to find it out.
But swallowed up by fangy Things,
or pride, then fall – we sang three hymns
at televangie’s funeral –
we never heard if he found out
The Grand Scheme of Things.

I guess we’ll never really know
until it’s happened; even so,
we strive and struggle, blow-by-blow
in The Grand Scheme of Things.