In Our Time

Old people asleep under yesterday's news
A freezing denial of Capital views
Wrapped from the winter in hopeless desertion
While oil heaters soothe our leader inertia
The Ministers gag until Parliament stands
No solvent like recess for washing the hands.

Carousel fever, polepidemic
Power the plague, and glory symptonic
Good men and true have succumbed to the curse
Humanity's syphillis dressed as nurse
More power prescribed as cure for the ill 
Sinecure sanctity, smoothest of pills.

Ignorant rhetoric will always appease
A ravenous thirst for mass marketing sleaze
Confidence, colour and loads of compassion
Offering silk from pork auricle rations 
Bidding for destiny's role of Messiah 
A flourishing specie, Earnest Pariah.

Barely beneath this posturing swagger
Is hidden a sheathed amorphous dagger
Policies hacked from pre-polling-booth crass
Poverty, pestilence, pain for the mass 
Tear-streaked appeals or national fervour 
Fail to dissuade the starving from murder.

Enter the honest man seeking endorsement
Shouting the truth from podium and pavement
But truth lacks conviction and wreaks of decline
So parasites push for the cosy sublime
Exit the honest man broken and bloody
Onward the bureaucrat smiling and ruddy.

MICHAEL REID
July 1992

© Michael Geoffrey Reid 1992, all rights reserved