To be maniac is the way to win.
Or not to be is not a question.
From escalator down to each ascension
madness is as madman does, and sin
eats sin and grows more grossly sinful in
each insult, sequitur, and weird digression:
what past-returning font of retrogression
switched off and left a moldering manakin
where once a king stood promising RETVRN—
false Cyrus flopped; he watched TV; the deep
old guard still runs this third or forth Rome
we’re on; the fiddle trills, the fires burn:
the gods? All gone. The augurs sleep.
The rally ends in rain. The crowd goes home.

If I could vote in NYC, I’d rank
no one who could ever ever win.
I’d conjure someone dead and write him in.
I’d eat my pen and leave the ballot blank.
I’d find the manager, give him a frank
and two-star rating. And cue the violin.
I am, in politics, a Bedouin,
camp-wracked and homeless while elsewhere swank
ballrooms of candidates who actually
exist exalt or weep, concede or cheer:
to live-laugh, to eat, pray, love; to be—
How is it so, when reams and reams of factually
precise prognostications made it clear
that the median of medians is me?

Iran’s nuclear dreams may survive
even a devastating American blow.
Ahem, yeah, woulda been nice to know
before our baffled emperor contrived
to loose the largest bombs since ’45
in a war that’s made much less of shock than show:
a pregnant pause, a but, a grand although—
and meanwhile, fission’s fuel is there, alive
as yet, truck-smuggled, mine-bound, ticking with
half-lives decay, refinement ready, and
as real and regnant as unreal were dreams
within the bombing Beltway’s kin and kith.
A ruler? No, a wrecked analysand.
From heights to depths, all countries are regimes.

Musk is no longer following catturd2.
How now a Hittite farmer must have felt
in terraced Tarsus as his fields of spelt
burned, his world collapsing, how he knew
his age of palaced, heroed bronze was through;
or how the mammoth feels as ice sheets melt;
or frightened fleeing kudu on the lioned veldt;
racked heretic to the sound of the turning screw:
what waterworld awaits us when such great
tectonic plates as these men drift apart;
Atlantis founders; all collapses; growing flocks
of seabirds circle, and the ark-borne final fate
of all man’s knowledge, science, all his art?
A painted sherd of dudes comparing cocks.

No, people will not “literally die”
with the One Big Beautiful Bill.
We have other ways and means to kill.
We have other gasping fish to fry.
We have both large and little lies to lie.
Such blood we have unspilt that we would spill,
lap up like dogs, and smile, licking still
our blackened lips, and rear our heads, and cry
to the gibbous midnight moon that we’re
the future, vampire lordlets of a dying state
whose Croatoan we’ve already scrawled
in tax and tariff, though in sunlit sleep we fear
secretly that few of us will mate
and openly that we’re all going bald.

The cuts were more popular when voters
didn’t hear the word “Musk.” They hate
his voice; his face; and they abbreviate
all that’s wrong by naming this self-promoter,
who whirs and whines like an electric motor,
who’s fool’s fortune and fortune’s foolish fate,
self-bought and sold, and soon, one prays, self-late.
First lost the Libs, and now the beautiful boater—
those whom the gods destroy they first make mad
online, bullshit-besotted, dumb lie-beset,
wretched victim of his own twit-filled milieu:
Nazi-curdled loser, absent dad;
Stammering Stürmer soaked in cocaine sweat;
goodbye, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu.

When you’re on that bike in your shorts, panting away
next to a Republican, a lot
of the inhibitions come off. The thought
of opposition warms to ardor as you sway
above the saddle, soaked shirt and gray
tits lumbering up and down, the hot
sweet sweaty scent your widened nostrils caught
wafting through the tropic humid furtive play
of glances, wheezing wet desire for
the philadelphian fondle of the ancient Greeks—
not sex, but something subtler, elder, male:
bonded for battle by the naked training floor—
peddles, rattles, gyrates, coughs and creaks:
hits the showers, back to work to fail.

A flight attendant politely chased me down
at an airport that I will not call O’Hare.
He said it looked like Democrats don’t care
about the boy with cancer. Sad emoji. Frown.
They say that every Congressman’s a clown,
but I am more a barstool liar with a flair
for confabulating social vaporware,
untrue in every verb, conjunction, noun.
There was no Jim, and I was never there,
but the story points to something that is sure:
airplanes and boys exist, are real, and whether
Brioche Dorée or Manchu Wok was where
they met in meaning, they are and mean: be more
rational, & get your act together.

He does not manipulate me. If you think
he does, you have missed my stories. We
are both the sparrow falling and the augury
here at the Times; in distant rooms the clink
of coupes. Someone says “objective.” Drink!
Every citizen, of course, is free
to feel: no ad has any hold on me;
my thoughts? the world beyond? in perfect sync;
self and perception? perfect harmony.
Vested in reporting’s sacristy
and chasubled by my BA degree:
I alone can see what others see
with bias clearly: it isn’t sophistry
to be, alone, what’s true. Or not to be.

A 19-year-old acolyte of E-
lon Musk known online as “Big Balls”
now roams the State Department’s marble halls,
a Tadzio to the Aschenbachian spree
of absurd elders aged past dignity,
hair-plugged, paunched, and jowled, howling at the walls,
whose own grown children rarely take their calls,
desiring feelings once-felt that now flee
across the lovesick waters of a clogged canal—
it does your bidding, but it is a dream—
you cannot re-become a callow youth
by hiring one to bust up the banal
dull business of DC, though it may seem
you can. It’s hot today. You’re long in the tooth.