Goodnight Rome

Goodnight to our Rome with all your garrisons and your streets that have become as loveless as empty barracks. For you I will never weep. After all, your Senators Who made the deals To keep the last Last And the first bored and lost in ennui, govern the burning ruins of the human city which evicted the cobbler and used the electorate as a weapon With unforgiving recoil Which guarantees that the bottom will stay at the bottom and dance to the music of the midnight carousel. 2 Now that the middleman has been cast To the prairie grass With his own middle cut away His fate was decided over lunch The legal apparatus has fallen from its hinge Leaving only the greatest felony Unnamed. And who are our neighbors When we’re sentenced to the Four year winter hotel? Will they be the nameless ghosts Evicted from their bodies by those Who are afforded the right to escape the tombs With kept wives in cheap furs And Upper eastside penthouses. And in all those apartments All the beautiful people Wash down oxycodone with fine wine While bitching about the junkie below. “Send the cops to clean up the drug Problem,” they cry. “All addictions should come with a ‘scrip.” It takes a truly trained country with few alternatives to put a knife to its own throat or hand it over to an orange buffoon with a poor hair cut in a loveless room. He always lines up his bets on what con will turn the American heart into just another dead theater where it was all the show of shows. And when the decision is made The worst one is chosen. The decision has certainly been made. For what other country Choses a landlord so crooked All self-respecting cons Walk past him Never stopping at all For fear he will pick their pockets clean For he is the biggest con of all, Who now has to do a sometimes honest man’s job. Those he loved the least Ignored all the papers Who for once Didn’t celebrate The game of chance But cried out With the urgency of a siren During an air raid to pick the other. While he spoke as one of the mob His heart was that of a landlord Looking to evict All his useful idiots From their lots. For now he can expect nothing in the end But to stand on the stairs Or escalator When all your Senators approach smiling with drawn knives. “Et tu Sessions?”