CIRCUSES WITHOUT THE BREAD
We are told by a Minister of the Crown
that the ‘death toll is mercifully low’,
that we must ‘learn to live’ with the pandemic.
We are a mature democracy but
allow ourselves to be treated like infants.
Though his writ runs only in the largest part
of these unequal, disunited kingdoms,
his pronouncements dominate the media.
He is the son of working class Pakistani
immigrants. A banker by trade, his vowels –
though not those of one who would have ordered
“Over the top!”, while brandishing a pistol –
have been completely shorn of his past.
He is a trimmer led by a trimmer –
that sinister clown, that jovial
sociopath, that idler, that sponger –
leader of a circus of distractors,
of seedy rhetoricians, of swindlers,
that extols the charity of food banks.
The coterie seems to be kept in power
by a clique of greedy, threatening, snobbish
xenophobic, racist parliamentarians,
obsessed with the zealotry of abstractions –
‘freedom’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘culture’ – but all merely
servants of the corporate masters
of the universe, who have already
acquired their gated Ararats, and designed
the manorial space stations to which they may
need to repair. Meanwhile, liberty,
we are told, must be measured in Starbuck’s
coffee cups and Wetherspoon’s cheesy chips.
Alan Horne
November 27, 2021That’s great, David! I like ‘zealotry of abstractions’, a most interesting idea. We need more of this kind of Philippic. I would especially like to be a fly on the wall of Heaven when Jacob Rees Mogg is explaining to St Peter as to exactly why he should be let in.
David Selzer
November 27, 2021‘…philippic…’ I like. I shall employ the term next time I’m asked way I’m ranting at the TV. I doubt Rees-Mogg will ever leave the Inferno – and there are no flies on those walls!
Alex Cox
November 27, 2021And ‘the manorial space stations to which they may need to repair’ are worthy of a poem of their own…
Alan Horne
November 28, 2021Hi Alex! Good to meet you on here. Very long time no see! I hope you are well. Alan.
Elise Oliver
December 14, 2021Ooh, I love a good rant. Worthy of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, this one – or @13sarahmurphy (without the expletives, presumably deemed unsuitable for the poetic genre. I could almost feel your resistance to their inclusion).
David Selzer
December 14, 2021Thank you both for the Juvenal and the Sarah Murphy compliments. Though, as you will remember, I am not averse to profanity in conversation I have genuinely never considered using it in a poem. I shall have to reflect on that.
Mary Clark
December 31, 2021Same here in the USA. There are tubs of money only the wealthy can access, inside their ‘gated Ararats’. The rest of us are grateful for a watery cappuccino at Starbucks.