Worse than Before but Still All the Same

I’m buried beneath a pile of dirty white socks
As I draw an artistic masterpiece via lightbox
I prance and dance with my friend Lance until the day is dawn
And then we both grab lemonades and set fire to the lawn

The warlord calls and warns us where to stay
So I throw my friend into a cell and set out on my way
The commissioner and his posse ride up the city street
And every last one of them has on a pair of spiked cleats

The blind old cynic calls out to Julius
He tells the old dictator about the sin of hubris
Then Brutus comes from nowhere and pulls a great prank
And crucifies the pirate lord from the deck of the plank

Soldiers born to Heracles hold their standard true
So I go into the merry seas and oceans so blue
The pantograph hatches Prometheus’ scheme
And issues commands from the nuclear machine

Nero uses his new gift to burn Rome to the ground
As politicians use the chance to spread the wealth around
Patrician families hold their status to the gods
As Antoinette force-feeds cake to all of the clods

From the ashes of the city a phoenix does arise
And Tom Outland’s engine sprays oil into my eyes
Sarkozy and Putin exchange a tense stare
As the changing of the guard brings grey to my hair

The aging of a people brings fat to their belly
And old Willy Loman can’t remember what to sell me
He walks into the poison hole to breathe the cyanide
And Biff cannot decide if it is patricide

Vonnegut and Cather dress up for the waltz
As Langston Hughes and blues men argue at the march
Malcolm and Robert are murdered at the fair
And my gnarled wooden leg turns into a chair

Sitting at the table, I play my fiddle loud
And Moses and Jesus part the middle of the crowd
I see red, the crowd goes dead, silent as a photo
And Jesus breaks out his guitar and hammers out a solo

Suddenly a demon who calls himself Walker
Goes to war with stories written by Faulkner
Racist old men explode all over Birmingham
About matters that should not be concerning them

A sword and a shield appear in my hands
I throw them aside and go buy up some land
Katrina, the temptress, she wrecks the old town
Leaving gumbo chefs with a permanent frown

The story keeps on changing, the writer is scared
All the world filters through his angry red flare
The poet calms his nerves and slips him some booze
What comes next seems almost too hard to choose.