(in memoriam Christopher Fry, 1907-2005)
Cocktails, and second-string gods.
Strongmen and bearded ladies
to entertain congenital snobs
whose monograms are mocked with ease
behind their pricey, tailored backs.
The gold is in the fiction, for facts
disapprove of incest among heroes,
awaiting some Messiah entouraged with zeroes.
Still, the waiter rises from his rest
to situate the harmless status quo,
to provide an itch the comfortable guest
had previously not believed was his to know.
Nothing borrowed, nothing owed:
what poet in his right mind
would lend his name and napping time,
his bourgeois soul and rebel’s claim
to such a motto, gray and unashamed,
this advice to the young from the old.