The speaker describes a habit of seeing odd, almost absurd images wherever power and authority show up. Money carries a king's codpiece, a comic picture that makes wealth look vain and bodily rather than dignified. Demands that we "deny the present" turn into a temple, as if the insistence on giving up the here and now were a kind of religion with its own sacred building. Then the Pope arrives in the mind "like a fat moth," a soft, slightly ridiculous image that suggests something drawn to light and clumsy in its approach.
The speaker seems skeptical and playful rather than angry. Each vision cuts big institutions of money, faith, and rule down to size with a joke. The mood is dry, irreverent, and a little dreamlike, since the images drift in uninvited. The short, unpunctuated lines add to that feeling of passing thoughts, quick glimpses that mock authority without making a long argument.