Welcome one and all
To insanity on display
Where songs from a once-great hall
Loop endlessly all-day
Where carnivals of calamity
Capture cretins carousing in vain
Washing each drop of their humanity
Down the hyperbolic drain
Gaze in silent wonder
At the spectacle of excess
When it’s a bargain for a blunder
There can be no recompense
Watch weary wizards winding
Past the paranoid on parade
Though the marshal’s oath is binding
The performance has been delayed
The calliope bleats a sour note
To an empty house of grief
The player learned to play by rote
And is bad beyond belief
The orchestra stirs in the pit below
Losing faith with every verse
Incompetence builds to a vertigo
Each chorus even more perverse
Watch the surreal scene unfold
In sputtering pantomime
The composition is far from bold
And the arrangement is a crime
Only hours from the premier
The composer struggles to conceive
With the crescendo drawing near
There is little time to grieve
Where ghosts that haunt this place
Once labored at the profound
They’re now left to languish in disgrace
As their plaintive wails confound
Both the critics and the matinee
Sold out at record speed
Even a clown can rule for a day
When quality succumbs to greed
At long last, the curtain is drawn
Despite a preponderance of delays
Any hope of redemption from the carillon
Has coalesced in the audience malaise
So carry on casual consumer
For nothing good can be conferred
It’s all obscenity in bad humor
Here at the Theater of the Absurd
Mannino Acid 