And does this false autumn give permission to false winter,
The russet leaves to remain on their branches,
The snows' return from the mountains be postponed,
And the sun blaze hottest on midwinter's day?
False in the cycles of passing enmeshed with arrival,
The champion holds the laurel and the pretender falls,
Until such season as the pretender does not,
The King is dead, long live the King.
Irascible, he was, the Bear, and mighty,
But he stands beside short men and bulks himself with hidden
towels,
Too kingly against the onslaught, too straight in the back when he
should bend as the reed,
Trumpets, drums, and the pretender was king, how false, how false.
A philandering man, a leering, rutting man, eager to complete the
oath, start the dream,
His Camelot a doubtful Camelot,
Tenacious Cromwell, our Lord Protector, gripped by an ire he
does not fully understand,
Kaplan intervenes, the left hemisphere is shattered, the cripple limps
on a time,
Wilkes Booth, seeking free speech in the theatre, he has a fine name
of freedom, he uses it,
At midwinter, when an antlered man took up stone knife and put it
across the king's throat,
Treason to say it, but we know a time (foreign for its demolition)
when the king was not king,
Transported from the old land to the new, a different orb and sceptre
has changed us,
The Green Man goes to the wilderness to die, the King is dead, long
live the King,
That pause when Anarchy began to grin
Find a backwater bar and listen sociably, chewing on chicken and
sipping at ale, to the happy recollections aired,
To any who wanted to hear,
The Bear recounts his life, the Bear brought back to life,
What deformity would this be, something that was King and is not
now?
The final, the paragon, last-punished Gaius Cassius Longinus,
Who fought on the Parthian field at an age when others still
experiment,
Winning his spurs as quaestor to Marcus Crassus,
Having no respect for the Gods, how can he respect their
representative?
My face expressing only the calmest lake,
Says Cassius: I will not be changed by Caesar's death.
Rex quondam, rexque futurus,
Our former hope to be our future hope, or the whole is specious,
Not gold, silver or brass, these sickly creations, baked of clay no
stronger than pastry,
For all is not well with Kings, as the seasons stand.
