For the same reason I will not run
for President
I no longer rhyme: I can’t afford to.

They are expensive, those words that ring
my tocsin heart;
they cost me jobs selling watches and cars

plus commodity talk used to swing
deals in dark bars
in D.C.. Put me up at the P.A.

and they accrue so much interest
the sounds don’t stop
until hawks pierce them with squawking nonsense

no sane caucus would ever elect.
So I’m caught here
in the eternal smear campaign of sound—

less my partner in crime (my vice echo)
to ride shotgun
as the hawks refuse the crumbs I throw.

drew maps with roads to the wrong places.
A road ending in Calcutta on paper
actually led to Bombay;
islands off Spain were really near Brisbane.

He figured all the false distances
for missiles to hit oceans
or explode into mountains.

Years of circulating these maps
would rearrange the world, slowly
disrupt government.

He would have succeeded,
if not for his assistant,
who, in a personal attack,
informed National Geographic.

Later, as an experimental gardener
at Kew, he was found
attempting to rename certain flowers,
and died a pauper
in a town whose name
historians spitefully periodically change.