Mountebanks and madmen
And marvelous maidens
Populate and pollute politics
Which joss sticks cannot chase
Or alleviate the electorate
In its counter clockwise swirl
Down its own bathroom drain.
Only morals don’t ameliorate
It only exacerbates, enervates
Rather than eliminates the pain.

The pain is felt by franklins,
Never the nobles or magnates;
They go on and make play dates
With other multi-billionaires
In debonair pied-a-terre lofts
And scoff at the peasantry
While exchanging pleasantries
Over gold-laced desserts
Thinking nobody gets hurt
If they pilfer and pillage
Far off village and town
Tearing down and razing,
With life grazing scorched earth.

To the rich, nobody has worth;
Voices that implore are muted
And garbage-chuted in the press.
Nothing to confess, the smile;
A mile of porcelainized teeth
Made more intense by pretense
That importance is impotence
In the face of extreme wealth
When stealth cease efficacy
And delicacy isn’t required.
The moral judge is fired.
A new wife is squired
In hopes a son is sired
To take over the empire.

In the lonely existence of my thoughts,
The only thing I hear is the soft, loud murmur of words exchanging,
The crunch of wrappers,
Opening
Closing
Wrapping
Being thrown,
The creaks of chairs being moved
To
There
And fro,
The sound of bag chains, trays chuted and orders done,
The calming sound of laughter being made and given.
In the lonely existence of my thoughts,
I found sereneness.
With a cup of cold coffee,
Water draining
Evaporating,
Leaving a circled mark of water on the table
And the light passing,
Gave a sense of serendipity,
With the voice of Adele from the speakers.
In my lonely existence,
The sound of low murmurs gave me assurance.
Of something real and human and true,
Of what it’s like to live and feel,
Of empathy and joy.
And on how my lonely existence can be not so lonely,
Even on a mundane fast food chain