THE EAR
Virgo aurus I send to you, my Lord,
in this hand made Kenneth Cole case;
my faith I place in your just dictum,
our fate in the deeds of the ethnoparler.
To lop off one pinna, my fellow citizens,
and leave the membrane unprotected tells us
that we are all affected. Thus, I ask,
in this hour, do we not all feel ravaged?
Werra or campagne, will they come along
if I promise them not a soul will be lost?
I can always claim we shall spielen a Krieg
with my brand new set of terra cotta figurines.
People will understand. An ear is an ear.
It is in our national interest to be all
ears to pin their ears back. Our three-deckers
are invisible to their radars in crow’s nests.
Good tidings they bring, my Lord. The bellum
wasn’t bello, the Porto is in ruins, but I
venture to say that we were compassionate.
And, the humanitarian aid is on the way.
We shall also, with your gracious approval,
send them other things, to show we mean well,
teddy bears, crayons, balls, generously gifted
by Toys’r’Us; also, surplus army tents.
Others have to pitch in. My advisers tell me
our requests have fallen on deaf ears, pardon
the phrase. Oh, no one will remember the ear,
only if we contained the endemic conflicts.
And kept our ear to the ground. Trying times
are before us. Successions. Secessions. People
talk of glad bags, seeing the elephants. I
want to leave all this, go to play some golf.