Of the Dreaded Scourge Currently Afflicting the Municipality and Environ of My Nativity and Youth

This dread disease that has afflicted my home, This malady, this plague on my house; This making convertible the former quaintness and provincialism thereof Into something wholly despicable and disgustingly homogeneous, Yclept "cosmopolitanism," and "worldliness," and "globalization," (Or, perhaps "globalism"); That force of rude power that recognizes no potency but that of itself; The rising tide of puissant, unfocused destruction that threatens to sweep away all, I damn it herewith And herein! Let it be damned, forever damned! It is as a marauding force, the soldiery of a vast empire, invading and occupying My home, my home! O, my poor, beleaguered, inoffensive home! Nothing was done by it ever to any man, woman or child, but an influx of new citizens Have poisoned the blood thereof, and the body And the soul and the mind, And the now-infected heart! They eat away at it like some horrid corrosive acid! These many paths, where once I trod, half of them are gone, stripped of Their hearty, healthful, verdure and turned into dwelling-places, Habitations, abodes of the damned for the cosmopolitan hordes who have Descended en masse upon this once-fair city. Edifices treasured in my youth are destroyed and swept away, Leaving behind only the ashen remnant; else transformed into Something wholly unrecognizable. Little wharves that lined the verge of the littoral precincts of the community, These are now wholly disfigured by the dread, ravenous Affliction of cosmopolitanism and homogeneity. Where are the streets I used to tread? Where are the thoroughfares and climes of my remembrance? Where the environs I most enjoyed, through the breadth of which I Rambled and cavorted? 'Twas a working port...a place to indolence unknown, and but Little visited by the scourge of idleness. Sparta has become Athens, yet I do not rejoice over the Attic change! Would that the artistic and Cosmopolitan Athenian would become the Toilsome, industrious and warlike Spartan again! (Never did I think I'd utter those words, but yet I have, And I would fain reiterate them) The character of the sun has changed, too...evolved into something Indistinguishable, hidden, darkened, candlelit and moonlighted. The sun is a potent, overwhelming sidereal body of aureate light and burning gas; the moon but a turgid, opaque, lacteal and weak thing. And yet, which one now reigns o'er all that once I loved and in Which once I was proud to yclept my dwelling-place?