What Goes Around Comes Around?
This fairground throbs: all beckoning bass
and trill-trebles calling grown-up children
along with daughters and sons.
For every child not yet Big Dipper enabled
or Roller Coaster ready
the loony-tune Hammond notes
of the gee-gee’d Merry-Go-Round
are today’s bob-spin attraction.
“Hang on tight!” She hangs on tight
as fulcrum’s tonnage eases into life
and carousel carousal begins –
all smooth-dipping lurid horses,
circle-crazy whirling light-trails
of giant spinning-top screaming
and new on-the-edge ecstasies
in repeated grin-gape glimpsing.
Suddenly that mad organ noise
whittles to gasping bagpipe whines,
rising circuitous speed dwindles,
pulsing colour-pumping lights spark out:
something inside has broken –
core-weight has confounded its power
and the current is dammed,
dead in its dervish traces.
Here, what goes around
no longer comes around
and all these grown-up children
hear “Mummy! Daddy!” wailings
one hundred and eighty degrees
bereft from that “Hold tight!” moment:
frantic paths criss-cross swiftly
in a rider-consoling scurry.
Myths of perpetual motion die hard:
the pendulum does not swing forever
with comforting m.o.r fairness –
that lie is just a karma-carnival sugar-pill.
Ted Eames, 2022