Ye All Go For Men

author's note: Although I use the word "you" in this poem, I'm not
addressing my current readership who I greatly value and respect.
"You've shown great taste," As Oscar Wilde joked after a performance of
"The Importance of Being Earnest." No, rather I hope you will flow with
me, for we live in a dark age and those who dominate it must be called
to account. Aye, in the general catalog, and at the polls, ye go for
men, as the petty pekanese, the barbaric Rottweiller and the faithful
Newfoundland all go for dogs, as the guppy, the steelhead and the great
white go for fish, as the finch, the owl and the bald eagle go for
birds, but which of you will undertake the enterprise of humanity,
which would prove you to be not among the baser sort? For how much
wider is the disparity between a stock broker and a Socrates than
between a small blue tail and a Komodo Dragon! There are those of you
who would go for holy men while upholding a capitalist society that
sells videos of vagrants intoxicated and bribed into the most degrading
and self destructive acts imaginable; I assure you, just as he
overturned booths in the temple, he would fly an airplane into your
television stations. Did you praying mantises not hear that those who
turn away the poor man who knocks at their door turns away our lord
himself, or so he will consider it at the day of judgement, your
holiness W. Bush?!; You spent the money for dental care for the poor on
an immoral war. Some of ye would go for working men and yet what are
your works?: pavement, cars and coca-cola cans which can be recycled
and turned into bombers to drop napalm on the defenders of Fallujah,
barbarians perhaps but no worse than the American variety. Which of ye
has studied Confucius and learned that the order of a bee hive is
necessary to produce the honey which sustains the tribe for so much
longer than the mere two thousand years since man achieved any
proficiency as a tool using species? Ye masses are already worthless
and witless and yet you hire wigs to deprive me of ale, to enliven, and
weed, to enlighten! Oh, I would you would first build a monument in
apology to Wilde, genius of our civilization, whom you imprisoned and
killed for the terrible crime of sodomy? And you will cage me, too,
though you find no better charge than denying the Gods and corrupting
the youth but I care not, for the catalog will be sorted and the fire
and brimstone with which ye threaten the innocents will be your own
home.