The gloom persists. It's evening now. I'm reading about the Hundred
Years' War. England and France, NATO and Russia; somebody always
Wants more than he has. Let them all fight. Let those who lead perish.
Sadly, that's never the way it turns out. Plumbers and sales clerks,
Farmers and students, are sent out in columns; in boxes return,
While the latter-day nobles, the owners, as always, of means
Of production, ride jets to negotiate nothing but menus and places
To stay. How they thrive as their subjects grow poorer and deader,
I think as I sit in the gloom.