Ancient Rome post-Domitian
A sense of renewed mission
The old wants prove rude: wealth, property, worldwide dominion.
The bloodthirst of a fish chewer
A fistula connecting his doings to Rome’s fiscal ruin.
The centre cannot hold
If in moonbeams tales are told, that molten O served omen
The brittle middle whose part sum is Rome
To the conquered, woe!
Peaceable ashes and lots of them
Hopes dashed like boats smashed to flotsam at Actium
The facts: in glum postpartum mode
Legs splayed upon the back of a slave, even purple robes
At hundred pearl prices lose lustre in whirls of lust and vice
None suffice. Extolling the rapidity of that downhill rolling rock
Displaced from the whole and bound for the homeplace.
I can see the ball disappear over the wall
But I’m stuck at homeplate, in turgid stasis
Bored of territories, bored of foreign wars
Bored of Daddy’s glory, a newness, yet inchoate
Awaits invitation into the rank mule-stunk stable of its birth
This lowly station belying little of the awaiting attainment
Titles and ranks in locust multitude heaped upon him.
Alchemisland 
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