Liber Saturni - Chapter 8

Verses

By order of the Feast, all orders are suspended until the next sober person complains.

Masters shall carry the cups; servants shall criticize the furniture; cats shall hold every office already suited to cats.

Saturn has had his ankles untied. Hide the respectable people.

Tonight the miser must give, the judge must dance, and the philosopher must lose at dice to a baker.

Whoever says hierarchy is eternal shall wear the donkey crown and fetch onions.

We praise the old Golden Age mostly because none of us remembers the plumbing.

Let no citizen be punished for speaking nonsense before sunrise, unless the nonsense becomes policy.

The statue was bound all year so that one winter night freedom could make an entrance.

A jinn asked the priest, Which law is sacred? The priest answered, The one we reverse ceremonially.

Then the jinn stole the ceremony and returned the law with bells attached.

Feast while the granary allows it. Even rebellion has an agricultural budget.

If your god cannot survive one evening of mockery, your god is a nervous clerk.

The cat beneath the banquet table knows the true republic: all factions drop meat eventually.

At dawn restore the offices, the debts, the solemn faces, and the keys.

But remember who wore whose sandals, for memory is the small crack by which empires breathe.