Deserue Corne Gratis?

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.

Ill-baked republic high castled in the round,
the stage is set for tragic skirmishes between
rising power-hungry tribunes and gray-head
aristocrats. How soon the prattling plebeians
forget the scars your imperial service earned you!
Dare they now so soon demand demonstrations of
humble fealty, that you be made to prance around
for them like some sick and swaggering pony,
to seduce them of their tawdry, volatile ballots?
But are you so haughty that these seething skies
have gone transparent before your warlike eyes,
which now fail to apprise how hunger churns the
unspoken, recondite climate? You misread the
oracle in the sheep's bowels, the flights of crows
beyond the fields, an interpretive miscarriage of
your own changing times: anger itself's become
the true meat that calls the peasant mouth to water;
anger over disparities long since presumed the
noble born's just due. Aristocracy, through no
misstep of your own, has grown synonymous with
tyranny, but this new dictum you can't quite work
your mind around, can you, Caius Martius?

The meteorology of republican politics is an infant
science, vagaries of loyalties adherent to no
apparent pattern, honoring no familiar convention.
The words are muttered with obvious passion, but
coherent significance remains elusive, and you
write it off to lower-class foolery. But secret
Powers are afoot, well-versed in how to stir the pot
of Citizenry; how well they plot, these grinning
marionettes whom you despise and dismiss, their
hollow heads not now so straw-stuft as you long
presumed; they're conspiring cautiously calculative,
pulling new pragmatisms near into their breasts
with close, whispered counsel. They wit well how
they may hope to plunge their puppeteers down
into the pit. What's become of the truism that
the belly must purvey and sustain first the princely
head lest all be slaughtered? But: see! Now the
master's mastered! And is that not the way it
should be in any rising republican democracy?
Heads must be made to roll.

Ravisher of ringed cities, monolithic penetrator
of curving battlements, beware: the very milk
which suckled you to strength cannot but bid you
treason yourself and reason with these lesser
mortals a way back into their hearts, tainted
with the low grit and grime of local realism, to
coil there like some cursed worm after love from
holy Rome, which so recently without pity or justice
cast you out. You have no city now, you traitor,
you banished thing flung backwards to a narrowing
appendix, a tight cul-de-sac in time, where your
bloody wounds, so esteemed by your hungry dam,
must now be put on base public display through the
rapturous streets of Antium, whether you would or no.