They smile, and they attend social functions and are in pages of
a city's social diary, a mockery of a democracy
the Hearsts and the Bloombergs  and the others rolling in it
so their aging women can have too much plastic surgery
because time happens to the elites, too, and cancer and unhappiness
and the smiles hide the discontent and the slow death
and they are afraid of us, can't bear to be with us, this other species we are
and once, with my now X, at a fundraiser for his elite boarding high school
I listened to a pretentious speech that was so intolerable
underneath the canopy of a white tent in the middle of a gigantic field
with every grass blade evenly spaced and the same height, and the soil
filled with nitrite.
And the speech ended and the applause served as cover, like brush and I ran
out into the open air and flattened the springy grass
and I walked away because I could take no more