Raise another glass.

Raise another glass.

I am exalted.

Sovereign.

Are we not all so?

What does it mean anyway?

When so many are blown away

By a feckless wind

The seeds of doubt

Planted in single rows

The words so precisely read

Reinterpreted

Let he who casts the first

Grenade

Into the hen house

Be the one to explain

To me

How fortunate I am

To be free

When nothing good

Came out of semantics

Linguistics left a sour taste

On the tip of my tongue

When so many alibis

Were used to trump

My own.

Sad tales of woe

Are ten a penny,

In the first world.

Order is as much a scene of chaos

To the alien

As the hand of friendship

Is to a solitary man,

Left standing

After a hallucinogenic apocalypse

Has taken its first steps

Toward a conclusion.

“We all saw it coming”

So sayeth

The multitude

Who march toward it

With open arms

Amendments

And scribbled apologies

Written in the margins,

Where ragged trousered philanthropists

Slave owners,

One-armed bandits

And bootleggers

Pretty in pink

Shaken but not stirred

Play statues,

Among the bloodspots,

Dripped

From the quill of a dead Swan

A signature dish

Good for the constitution

Boom Boom.

And on the main stage,

In the round,

The whole world turns

On the back

Of a promise

Of reformation

And carbon neutrality.