I'm like the king of a rain-country, rich 
but sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch, 
one who escapes Fénelon's apologues, 
and kills the day in boredom with his dogs; 
nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry, 
his people dying by the balcony; 
the bawdry of the pet hermaphrodite 
no longer gets him through a single night; 
his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb; 
even the ladies of the court, for whom 
all kings are beautiful, cannot put on 
shameful enough dresses for this skeleton; 
the scholar who makes his gold cannot invent 
washes to cleanse the poisoned element; 
even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy, 
our tyrants' solace in senility,
we cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose food
is syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood.