The majestic days of Czars and Sultans
with their immaculate royalty

and those of Barons and Khans
brimming with stainless primacy

have long since gone.

All their embellished repositories
of capital, jewelry and gallant armies
stand looted, ravaged and plundered.

The struggling proletariat of those times
with their humdrum lives, rife with strife
have also bitten the dust

      expired, forgotten, crumbled

since days beyond recall.

Now we, the successors and heirlooms
live on with kindred joys and glooms

as communities, creeds and nationalities

recklessly defending close-held foxy illusions
of defunct oneness or mythical deities.

The more tolerant among us even feel dignity
in misplaced, romantic nationalism(s)
and mostly off-the-mark, drifting democracies.

❋

But this time or that
summate a few more gimmicks or subtract,
all we have gifted ourselves
are some arbitrary lines on the map

slashing the earth to pieces
then claiming its wiggly, volcanic geographies
as slices of ever-dodging Elysium
enshrined in fragile master-bluffs
of precarious, cut-throat politics.