CLEAN

CLEAN

Senator HIJKL
dawdles through the hearing

playing solitaire
fiddling
with the Tarot

I see
The Fool
The Falling Tower
The Hanged Man

I do not see
Death
or
The Devil

but I am not observing him
as clinically as I should
those cards may
have slipped by me
by sleight of hand

and now
  a pencil is produced
for doodling or
perhaps sketching
              whilst the video
runs he
      doodles away

sketches a future
I’m sure as works of art go
it is
    no Picasso
not Cubist or
blue period

        certainly no Guernica

Oh JKL doodles
      doodles away

        the walls of Republican Rome
once covered
in such graffiti
                  under Augustus
were given
a clampdown extreme
    right royal
and (most) imperial clean

never had
      to suffer a repeat of
the process

never
the call to go
  through such a scouring
                            again.