A Mercedes registered in Sweden
driven by a Russian oligarch;
Olga high on coke and booze
snoozes on the passenger seat.

A violent Catalan separatist
trysts with a Franco-nostalgic
in a Barcelona tapas bar
car-bombed last year.

A forty-year-old French bankster,
former merchant bank wheeler-
dealer, propelled high up, elected
select president, liberal dictator.

A dingy life-boat maroons
on a lonely Grecian island,
landlords expel the castaways
way too brown to be housed.

A German shepherdess blesses
austere Lutheran rags,
drags dark omens,
menaces her bewildered sheep.

A drove of faces, as many
twenty-first-century aliases
outnumber the page space,
pace the continent’s surface.