The Teenager Who Sat in the Chair (Pope John XII)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You became Pope
at eighteen
which means the College of Cardinals
looked at a teenager
whose primary qualifications
were his bloodline
and his grandfather's army
and said:
this is the Vicar of Christ —
and the Vicar of Christ
responded
by turning the Lateran Palace
into the kind of establishment
that charges
by the evening
You ordained a ten-year-old
as a bishop —
a deacon in a stable —
toasted the Devil
by name at dinner
and the dinner
smelled like spilled Frascati
and the warm tallow
of candles
burning in a room
that had not been sober
since your election

[Verse 2]
The Liber Pontificalis
lists your sins
the way a concierge
lists amenities:
gambling in public,
invoking pagan gods
during dice games,
blinding your spiritual advisor,
castrating a cardinal
who disagreed with you
on a matter
that was probably not
worth what it cost him
You ran the papacy
as a personal project —
not spiritual,
not administrative,
but recreational,
the way a man
runs a vineyard
when he is more interested
in the tasting room
than the harvest

[Chorus]
The women
were the part
the chroniclers
could not stop writing about —
the Lateran
as a catalog
of arrivals and departures
so frequent
the doormen
stopped asking
for names
You were the Pope
and the Pope
was supposed to be
the intermediary between God
and the species
and you used the intermediary
to intermediate
between yourself
and whoever
was in the building
that evening
which is not what
the chair was built for
but the chair
had never
had a tenant
honest enough
to admit
what the building
was good for

[Verse 3]
The Holy Roman Emperor
came to depose you
and you fled
and came back
and fled again
and the back-and-forth
had the structure
of a marriage
neither party
wanted to acknowledge
was already over
You died at twenty-seven —
the official account says stroke,
the unofficial account
says a husband
came home
at the wrong hour
which is either
an assassination
or the world's
most predictable
scheduling conflict

[Outro]
Nine years as Pope
and you ordained no legacy
except the proof
that an institution
can survive
the worst possible occupant
of its highest office
and still function
the next morning —
the incense still lit,
the liturgy still read,
the doors still opening
onto a city
that watched you
set fire to the dignity
of the position
and noticed
the position
did not burn
which is either
a miracle
or an engineering report
on the structural capacity
of twelve hundred years
of accumulated sanctity