They’re everywhere. We, their prey,
do well merely to hold the line,
salvage remnants of our days;
it’s part of nature’s grand design.
They close on us like toxic skies
thick with soot, slide their bleak,
soulless, calculating eyes
all over us, a gaze that seeks
only life to smother, joy
to quell, opportunities
to break our shiny birthday toys,
count our heedless calories.
Clergy bids us to be nice,
in fact to love them, but the scent
of such self-interested advice
is rank, familiar, evident.
To make it worse, they always seem
to prosper, to have the upper hand,
their monumental self-esteem
beyond our power to withstand.
They get themselves elected, twice,
despite their pinched and addled brains;
leaving us to pay the price
and try to scrub away the stains.
10 comments:
Now, I just love the title of this poem and the way it sets the tone. The bile with which it is written is delightful too. And, of course, as always there's that truth at the heart of it all - these guys really are the universal assholes of the world.
(BTW there is a typo in the second line).
Thanks, Bill. And thanks for your good eye--typo fixed. Now, I'll be going back to my bunker, at an undisclosed location.
Given all that... what I'm still wondering is how, in the name of all that is holy, did they get themselves elected twice? No, maybe you shouldn't answer that.
HI, Abs--it's easy as ABC:
ADVERTISING--Aka lying. Promoting fear. Newspeak. Raise the Big Lie to consummate art. Libel, slander, smear.
BULLSHIT--Utterly shameless posing. Image-carving. God-mouthing. Destigmatizing ignorance. The world is flat--who needs facts? Make hypocrisy a cardinal virtue.
CORPORATE GREED--give them what they want and they'll help you destroy the world. No problem, Bud...
That's about as near as I care to figure it, Abs. But it still doesn't make any sense.
Politics makes me sick.
It's always about money and power and never about people.
Boo!
...so, just looking at the last couple of poems... did you get a vacation this summer? Maybe a long weekend out of town?
Those are good for the soul, you know.
Scarlett & Viaggiatore
Hundreds of thousands of needlessly dead and maimed people is what makes me sick.
As money is a pre-requisite for a successful candidate to move into the God Realm, how can you ever hope to find a real, live person to break the chain? The puppet show continues.
Very good question, Kate. If it weren't for the internet, I'd have no hope at all. Not that I have much...
You forgot the big label - spin-doctoring, which seems to me to cover the entire ABC. Makes me feel ashamed that I was ever in marketing...
I guess what I still struggle to handle is given that there is so much bullshit that people can't actually smell the stench... that's what I find so scary.
Yep.
Post a Comment