How is the loan different from the knife. Part 3

Usury
A sin against God
	The Vatican anyway,
Credit notes as interest
Without breaking the decree
Still a friend of the church.

We drank the Brunello di Montalcino 
And played all night
With the women from the court
Their perfumed and beautiful limbs
Beneath the rustle of silk and velvet
Precious stones in their hair
gold chains, lace, jewels and feathers
Pulled from birds that sung in the morning
Not that the rich would know.

Sprezzatura 
hand-blown Venetian cristallo,
That shatter on contact with poison
For who would feel safe among their friends?

The tasting of the dishes
the laying out of dishes on the credenza
the illumination of the wine in the goblet
Watch the jester get drunk.

There must be blood in the alley
In the dungeons
On the paving stones of the Duomo
On the hands of cousins who kill cousins
Brother-in- law against brother-in-law.

Blood has flowed, retribution
Thirty nine conspirators beheaded
Murdered or hung on Easter Sunday.
Jacopo de Pazzi tortured for treachery
Disembowelled and hung
From the window of the Palazzo della Signoria’s window
The decaying corpses of his family beside him.

They threw  Pazzi’s body out through the Palazzo Vecchio windows
Decomposing bodies ripped from their graves
Dragged through the stinking streets
Savonarola tortured in chains
Burned at the stake until legs and arms dropped off.

	All men are capable of murder
		given the right circumstances 

There’s the Duke’s wife
Her dress dragging on the floor, ugly creature
Draped in Ermine 
Poor creatures 
Slaughtered for chastity and purity
All wasted on her
Even the crimson she wears
Blood red colour of crushed kermes 
The dead insects that found its afterlife
On the body of a whore.
She bedded the jester and they whisper
a black Nubian slave.
Her husband at the Vatican 
Where he has a room that overlooks the gardens
There are the accounts and the interest 
And profits to be banked
The credits called in
The debtors put on the street.