2016 and Me

 I grow older and the world goes on
A spectator only to events on TV
It’s all so much bigger than me 
But for all the concerns that America’s got
It is itself just a tempest in a teapot
And who will know or care in a hundred years
About our mundane cares and our tears...
And then there is the universe

Unbelievably large and also mostly dark
With black holes incredibly small and dense
Like American Politics
But let’s not ask what is it
Let us go and make our visit...

In January I admitted to a little pain
I know where my heart is I didn’t have to explain
I wish I hadn’t it turned out to be fine
It cost me more than a trip abroad
And all I saw was the inside of a clinic

The experience did not assuage this medical cynic
With giant machines made by General Electric
Whiling away my hours in windowless waiting rooms
with an aquarium  and a wall-mounted TV
The View was eroding what was left of my bonhomie
In a week or two we learn of our medical dooms

But at my age I consent to much surveillance
To discover early certain organs to keep an eye on
Ain’t misbehavin, says my heart,
But my pancreas plays its part
I’m tired or all this sweetness it seems to say
And if you don’t cut it out I’ll go away.
But at least my prostate isn’t prostrate
And so far has not yet begun to stray.
The weight of the world my joints don’t carry
But hauling me around gets kinda hairy.

Meanwhile I turn in the papers to obituary news
And the somber stony silent parks of cemeteries
With statues of pretty angels with the blues
Standing here and there in ones and twos.

In April I flew to Rome
Many miles distant from my home
Where human history lies very deep
which the detritus of time has buried in a lengthy sleep

Northeast through the night beyond Labrador
An oddly short night to Dublin at four
Shaken sleepless in my Aer Lingus coach
Earplugs and eyemask notwithstanding
 Twin three year olds shouting without reproach
Until finally we arrived in a damp rainy landing
Hurried through the terminal to another concourse
Just me and a hundred or so Irish teens of course.
We rose through the clouds and the Irish rain
To witness dawn on a cloudy plain
Diagonal across the Alps and southern France
Excitement held me in a sleepless trance

Fiumicino was a busy place
People and cargo in a relentless race
Luggage emerges and goes around
Bags rolling away with a clickety sound
And then I found and boarded a bus
That took us to the citta with minimum fuss
Straight to Rome Termini past the Coliseum
Map and compass firmly in hand
I found my accommodations as I had planned.
Old and funky in a ten storey building
It was just as Google Earth had said
But it had a bed and I slept for hours.
The Vatican Museum was sprawling
And with international visitors it was crawling
Soldiers behind planters sporting tommy guns
Peering around some statue’s naked buns
The popes have been digging it all up around home
What was once the glory of Rome
Statues without arms or heads or legs or hands
Lost in the expanse of time’s relentless sands.
I followed the trail and the hopeful signs
To the Sistine chapel where we formed two lines
Standing room only looking up high above the hall
Where Michelangelo five centuries ago painted frescos
And imagined the Last Judgement on the back wall.
 
Next day I visited the Basilica
Martyred saints above the colonnade

Saint Peter to the right contending with pigeons
The enormous room, the massive doors
Chapels paintings and graves of saints to each side
Michelangelo’s pieta to the right above marble floors.

And then I walked along to my hostel home
Getting lost and found in the streets of Rome
As darkness fell and traffic swelled.

I had my map I had my compass
What I lacked was a flashlight.

The colosseum and the Roman Forum next I espied
Where animals and gladiators fought and died
Where Senators met and Vestal virgins kept the flame
And Caesars went out empires to claim
And then it ended and fell into disuse
To newer generations
A sense of history twas not much use
For a time in the middle ages a quarry for stone
Until they realized Christians there had suffered abuse
And thereafter they preserved it or left it alone.
The Trevi Fountain next I found
And the Pantheon in the Round

The first previewed in La Dolce Vita
The second in that novel by Dan Brown.
But I wasn’t looking for clues supernatural
But it had a hole in the roof that cast a beam
The Spanish Steps were being renovated
Come back next year it cheerfully said
Maybe next lifetime or in a movie groovy
The Talented Mr. Ripley whence Matt Damon
Played the devious parasitic creep
Who offed Jude Law and sent him to the deep

Tom Hanks I’m not and I had a train to catch
Taking the local to Napoli

Arriving in that maze of a city
And having a pizza quite happily.
There in the shadow of Vesuvius
It has a future and a past that is quite duvious
In 79 AD it buried Pompeii
Preserving it for the tourists of today
A scary mountain when it blew
The population not appreciating the danger
And ash buried it all when it was through
Until centuries later it was dug up too

I took a bus then hiked up to the crater
Will it blow? I hope not now but maybe later

Back on down to Ercolano for some pizza
Then a look around Herculaneum.
Which sits in a hole that was once a beach
More of it is under Ercolano but out of reach
The beach is now a half mile yonder
And I had a hundred or so feet of mud to ponder.
As hooded ravens croaked overhead

I saw in the beach house the bones of the dead

Just another busy Roman town
That the volcano abruptly had shut down.

Returning to Naples there were museums
And more museums and pizzerias by the score
Some of the galleries require of you an appointment
If you didn’t wish to experience disappointment
The restrooms were a hidden pleasure
Challenging your orienteering skills to measure
Asking a monolingual guard she just said “Carravaggio!”
Farther away than a ball hit by Joe DiMaggio

My two kidneys were restless and whiny
As I contemplated the fate of the Elder Pliny
Caring not for more images of saints and fools
When my back teeth float the bladder rules.
Marsyras was a musician and an ancient Greek
Who compared himself favorably to Apollo
But the god of music tolerates not such cheek
Apollo not liking that, did not beat him hollow
“So Marsyas better than Apollo plays?”
And proceeds then and Marsyas flays.
Meanwhile I in the silence of the museum halls
Wonders at the lives of gallery watchmen and women
Standing sentry in doorways long
Making sure that visitors do nothing wrong
Dressed smartly in their black attire
The same paintings they all day see
And somehow not dying of ennui.

Back to Rome I returned by train

To the selfsame hostel but a different room
Closer to the ground where the cars do zoom
To unisex bathrooms and no seat loos
While twenty-somethings get loud on too much booze.

Another train to the airport I arrived with dispatch

And boarded the plane to Dublin with barely a scratch
As I prepared to depart that place
My two young seatmates were sucking face

An attendant feeling I did not want this to see or hear
Moved me some distance near an Italian couple with a kid
While they nattered happily in their native tongue
The kid endlessly kicked my seat 
In Dublin I went through American customs
Boarding another plane and off we went
I guess it is smart that they put customs over there

So being denied they save the return fare.
Flying west was uneventful
Watching bad movies on the seatback screen
No one on airlines gives you peanuts
Just coffee, beer, and maybe water.

On the seat back you can monitor the flight
As a little plane moves across the map
Northwest out of Ireland and just south of Iceland
Down through Labrador and the still frozen wastes
Of Quebec.
Just before we arrive in America
Liam Neeson makes an appeal for Unicef
The Aer Lingus stews the hat they pass
And I toss some euros in a glass.

In late afternoon we land at O’Hare
Not for the faint of heart to lightly dare
And after walking what seemed like a mile
I end up waiting for transport Chicago style
I can’t call for the bus above the din
And feared I would have to take a taxi agin
This made me cross and a little nervous
But I met a couple with a better phone
And caught the bus and finally got home.

The rest of the year passed in a blur
Of mowing grass and Donald Trump

Wasn’t my first choice or my second
Not sure the faithful got what they reckoned
Depending on your point of view
He’s rich, he’s loud he’s a New Yorker
With funny hair, and some eccentric views
He wasn’t nice, he minced no words
Not politically correct, was he for the birds?

Hillary said he was deplorable
But she and her followers were not all that adorable
Arrogant, boring, stiff and tricky too
She proceeded to Bernie Sanders screw
While Trump had his problems with females
Hillary’s bigger problems were with her emails.
The FBI was helpful then it was not
The Wiener files put her on the spot
The Russians seemed to express a preference
And Trump treated Putin with seeming deference

November came in kind of warm
The Cubs won the world series Yay!

But more states voted to send the Dems away

Jill Stein wanted a recount but I’m not sure why
They hoped Russian claims of non-interference it would belie.
Muddled was the aftermath
After politics I need a bath
The Obama CIA then complained
Claiming Russian fingerprints the ballots stained

Then the electoral college faithlessness encouraged
Would John Podesta ever be discouraged?
They encouraged protest about the popular vote
Ignore the constitution if it floats your boat.
And the real estate antichrist was duly elected
Because so many in the Midwest were disaffected
Would Hillary have been better? I’m not so sure
Her motives and her candidacy were not so pure
As liberals everywhere fell down and swooned
Is America doomed?  I guess stay tuned.

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