Poet Carpus

Poet Carpus

Once in the early 190s, I got 

     in a cart with poet Carpus 

and his wife, but I didn't say 

anything to him or even nod 

because he seemed frightened. 

I didn't enjoy the unrelenting 

doom he was able to versify. 

As I'd met him fifteen years 

or so earlier, he was pretty 

feisty and free, now in the cart, 

he looked busted down: I'd 

read in his poems where he'd 

been busted down after birth,

     as well as his brothers, two.

He was the only poet who fore

          shadowed where we are, 

as, over barrels shot of rotten

     carp packaged without salt.

Rich but stupid, unlike carp,

aristos with their faked asses

     use a next harvest against 

     which to invest. With time, 

they rot, too, as us who endure 

aristos hoarding land, holding 

     it away from the rest of us, 

as, "You should just die if you 

please," even if we don't please.

     So as Commodus exalts them,

the rest of us will starve until

     Commodus gets hit by his

          wife's Narcissus switch.

[persona]