Missing and Presumed Larcenous
(From The Triumph of Strife: an homage to Dante Alighieri and Percy Shelley)

Bucolic bungling bozo bureaucrats
Close ranks in search of anonymity,
Then line up like those ship-deserting rats

At any nearby exit they can see.
For nothing serves the self-promoting sloth
Like running from responsibility

While circling campaign coffers like a moth.
Addicted to the drug of oily ease
They take up venal vowing like the cloth

Bestowing on themselves the things they please.
In facile flatulent fatuity,
They frame their fraud as Occupant’s Disease:

Incompetents by their incumbency
Attracted to perfume of perfidy.

Not strangely do the shiftless disappear
As this they tend to do when times get tough
When abstract angst and nameless dread they fear

They cannot run too far or fast enough
Yet still their perquisites they wish to keep
As compensation for their service rough

It takes, you see, some nerve to fall asleep
And then play ‘possum while the nation writhes
Our Senators and Congressmen drink deep

Of swill that they consider as their tithes
While from our veins our lifeblood slowly leaks
They harvest us with slyly sharpened scythes

The Party, power for its own sake seeks
And from its ranks a noisome odor reeks