To sustain the operation and deploy it
With ever-growing intensity
As if to forestall the inevitability of its desuetude
And continually to augment the seamless texture of regulation
Always adding offices and mandates
As the subalterns might proliferate under the podestà
Never subtracting the superfluous the ceremonial or the moribund
With which the citizenry lack the capacity
To monitor much less comply withal
And their impotence
Before this burgeoning and unmasterable register of imperatives
Does not excuse them from payment
In kind health blood treasure and lifespan
Anesthetized it is true by bread circuses and figmentary reality
The privilege of purchase and the consummation of convenience
And they are comforted moreover by the compensatory thought
During intervals relieved of superstitious avarice
That their pain does not originate
From the malefaction of any person
Nor from the wickedness of any
More or less ignorant and therefore fallible neighbor
But only from the state of things
Within the vast but fragmentary abstract machine
The mere apparition of a universe of death