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What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

     The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

     Because the barbarians are coming today.
     What laws can the senators make now?
     Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

     Because the barbarians are coming today
     and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
     He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
     replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

     Because the barbarians are coming today
     and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

     Because the barbarians are coming today
     and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

     Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
     And some who have just returned from the border say
     there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Elyon Jun 2018
I’ve seen trees in white dust covered in red barks so to lean asking the dark-skinned civilian soldier to dance, to ****
as cranes stood awfully still in the night vigil of unsupported rhythmic rant, as mosque songs flew in cacophony with her
mental amber, whose face drips off at semi-covered sick puddle with dissolved soft tissues in magnificent soccer performance
and entering an expensive trance to answer foster homes or metro-stop problems selling large and loud fried mechanisms
of lively things, of trendy modes of being, as borrowed bikes lie unruly besides the rock, not locked but saddled down
not the saddened frown of foreigners, British consuls, forced English speakers or almost bald kindly smiling losers
that protests this portrayal, oh-so-heavily in cynicism’s eye, in the proud rooster display of really bad water quality
as I choose to not holler my soul out nakedly there, but over here where the prettiest girl in a hijab does smile
at her pious children playing wild, such bliss, that I would never know from the white thick films of her grandfather
that is mean to say, “someone down that ancestral seam must have done something.” implying folly, nothingness
in our libertarian mistletoe waltzing in suits and formal wear all andante in terminating station’s bugle’s sheer force
at its permissive admittance of goodbyes, in wispy accents that bothers your courageous boss’s college graduate daughter
at the cruel light-blue decoration bulbs draped across coconut trees that never fruit and hence is safe for the street
at the murals and skateboarding sites overfilled with graffitied mathematical equations in proud display of young idealism
at freshly brought cheap soy sauce smells rising high over no chimneys and new energy
for those without another home to smile wistfully
before bumping into the traffic lights, running amok, declaring themselves chickens.

— The End —