Thread needs MUSIC! So does the following poem-- any takers?

I nominate the following to be the "national anthem" poem for all whose jobs get nuked by career-dead stuff. Fonts added by me.

My Bishop asked me to "undo something" (my paraphrase) last year that I had definitively not done. His response afterwards indicated that somehow-- I had carried that out, and well. TBTG and K Patchen!

~S~

=================

IN ORDER TO
by Kenneth Patchen

Apply for the position (I've forgotten now for what) I had   
to marry the Second Mayor's daughter by twelve noon. The   
order arrived three minutes of.

I already had a wife; the Second Mayor was childless: but I   
did it.

Next they told me to shave off my father's beard. All right.   
No matter that he'd been a eunuch, and had succumbed in   
early childhood: I did it, I shaved him.

Then they told me to burn a village; next, a fair-sized town;   
then, a city; a bigger city; a small, down-at-heels country;   
then one of "the great powers"; then another (another, an-
other)—-

In fact, they went right on until they'd told me to   
burn up every man-made thing on the face of the earth! And   
I did it, I burned away every last trace, I left nothing, nothing   
of any kind whatever.


Then they told me to blow it all to hell and gone! And I blew   
it all to hell and gone (oh, didn't I). . .


Now, they said, put it back together again; put it all back the   
way it was when you started.

Well. . . it was my turn then to tell them something! Shucks,   
I didn't want any job that bad.

=====

SH

Kenneth Patchen, "In Order To" from Collected Poems. Copyright 1954 by Kenneth Patchen. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: Selected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1957) and http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=175618