"Smalls" - A Doggerel Epic

(The Smallsiad?)

1. URBIS MUNDI - THE ENEMY'S REARED HEAD

The televised signal stabs into space
The ivy vine covers the brick
The party collapses divisions of class
The cocktail is making guests sick.

Something for Nothing was promised by God
Then reneged on by agents of peace,
So as comfort in time of a Borderless War
They memorialize the deceased.

Little by little the catheter fixed
To incontinent bladders of lust
Demolishes all of the signposts affixed
To the flooded-out inroads of trust.


2. WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?

I'm every bit as zealous as your friends--
I simply don't believe in 'talking down'.
If people at the party
Cannot understand the jargon
It's not my style to feel for common ground.

There's only one or two great pressing problems:
The quickest route to paradise on Earth,
And whether to attend the claims of Beauty.
(The second you could group under the first.)


3. THE LAND OF THE THOUGHTLESS DEAD

You came to the metropolis to overlook the Turks
Who band together, gangster-style, to cross-promote their works
You found a chain of correspondence, going back to clerks
Who slaved in gas-lit offices, with hidden aesthete quirks.

The second Herman Melville moved to Massachussetts' sprawl--
The instant Wallace Stevens heard the Necessary's call--
The moment Andy Warhol saw his silk prints on a wall
Somebody in Accounting had to fill their jobs, or stall.

An appetite for paperwork is all you need to thrive.--
(I think the unemployment rate is less than 4 point 5.)
If you can get through undergrad, then you can stay alive
And knee-deep in some day-job from the moment you arrive.

(The class of petit-bourgeoisie, the managers and bosses,
Responsible for hirings and the nets of gains and losses,
At some point past (in undergrad?) mayhap have written glosses
On the works of Milton, Shakespeare, Yeats, or icons, saints, or crosses.)