A Shadow of Herself

 

Here comes Margaret toddling and

wobbling down the street and you

wonder if you're the only one who feels

she should be wearing heavy workboots

to anchor her firmly to the ground on

windy days. She is as light as a promise

made in bad faith. Even her smile is

lopsidedly tenuous hovering undecided

on her deeply wrinkled face so narrow

it crowds her features. She approaches

and you wait, deliver a smile as the

signal awaiting a conversation. And as

you pass small talk back and forth

grateful the wind is not too harsh this

day she turns slightly sideways and you

gasp at her reed-thin silhouette, her white

strands of hair parting way with her scalp

in a bid to live a life of its own. Her voice

soft and tremulous reveals the uncertainty

of her thoughts but there is communion

between you, the older robust woman and

the younger woman of frail existence.

In Pursuit of that Frisson of Pleasure

He had the trust and friendship of captains of 

industry, royalty, influential political elites and 

social aristocrats who flocked to his soirees

his sumptuous vacation properties, his Paris

and New York hideaways for he was greatly

valued for his specialty of accessing and

proffering the services of underage girls for 

entertainment in discreet assignations until 

finally his victims had the unmitigated gall 

to bring to public notice illegal activities of a 

child molester. Illegal only because his penchants 

became public. And so his misfortune disowned 

by all  his friends and acquaintances, he sat in prison

alone the victim of sudden desertion, soon to take 

his own life. Now his former mistress herself an

entitled aristocrat with her own roster of highly

distinguished alliances and the symbol of all

that society guards its young against, found

guilty of aiding and abetting his criminal acts

is sentenced to 20 years in prison. Not a word

much less an accounting from presidents and

princes who availed themselves of such services

concealed yet acknowledged while the penalty

for their procurement is assigned to an eagerly

helpful woman and they are shielded from

further scrutiny for after all they are men and as

such these foibles are forgivable, women's not.

 

Seriously, Now!

Wait now, is this a mock-up of high school

politics where the student council is comprised

of candidates whose breezy self-confidence

and high marks for memory and mimicry

make them the envy of the student body? A

moment of lightness in a background of stern

grey world events where leaders of the advanced

world economies sharing their complacency

of peace in their time champion a courageous

underdog at the mercy of a snarling bear. Where

in an engineered conference sit the G7 leaders

discussing a brutal war of attrition they respond

to by arming the victim; they a cheering section

in a no-holds-barred game of survival. Seated

comfortably as non-combatants whose nations

are not under threat ostensibly to listen gravely

to the leader whose nation is held hostage to a

manufactured territorial dispute, speaking by

video connection to the backs of the heads of

bored patrons, distracted by quips and mockery

passed back and forth in good fellowship, their

mutual protege's anguish in the conditions faced

by his country in pleas for greater assistance and

commitment lost to the aura of self-congratulation.

 

 

Compromise

 

Well yes, we're fairly pleased
with the little fellows. Mind
they do have a robust sense of
entitlement but it is leavened with
an air of fairness though they're
not entirely averse to compromise
as in they feel it is fair to their
aspirations that we concede and
compromise. So they agree to
suffer the ignominy of our
offering them dog food, never
mind its sterling quality, as long
as we also render unto the master
race their just due. They have
magnanimously negotiated their
just due in exchange for agreeing
to keep household peace, and we 
are duly grateful. Therefore choice
tidbits of whatever we presume to
eat openly in their presence must
be apportioned; to each his due
in this progressive household. And
all, they assure us, is forgiven.

 

 

What's In a Name? By Any Other Name, Still War

Like a pestilence of death-delivering automatons

they swarmed into the country entitled as an 

organized national military to declare their 

special military operation as though that 

designation alone legitimized the wholesale 

destruction and massive death count of civilians. 

Taken aback when the citizens of besieged towns 

and cities struck back aiding their own military's

response that brought Russian commanders to 

account, the attackers were outraged when their 

victims responded in kind lobbing long-range missiles 

over the border to awaken their neighbours to 

the fact their armed forces were ransacking and 

slaughtering them in a blistering scorched-earth 

program of annihilation. The invasion of Ukraine

given the nomenclature of a just and sacred duty 

to release its citizens from the grip of fascism. Their 

saviours battering the country -- demolishing its 

structures and resources -- once again outraged that 

resistance against their noble enterprise has come 

in the form of reprisal attacks against their officials 

by the deadly delivery of car bombs. Earning the

patriots and defenders of their land the condemned

status of terrorists. The oppressors are heroic, the 

attacked to be despised as contemptuously barbaric.

Hot Off The Presses

 

Pssst! If you had your Druthers would you choose 

to discard news brought to you through the usual tired 

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and government telling the stories of the day with that 

left lean so very tediously unspiced, selling the approved

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Have you heard? There's a new publication in town

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whose orientation is just not that of the political and 

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Oh, paid subscriptions can be useful and free-press

supportive donations gratefully accepted. All of this 

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of those among us whose Jew-hatred is legendary.

From Victim To Remorseless Bloody Tyrant

If there is a more universally despised man

let him speak in icy rage of the unfairness

of manipulated optics gearing world opinion

against a superior ideology that confronts the

corrupt existence of fascism, a force of evil

that stripped the world of its 20th Century

innocence, sending millions to their deaths

and he above all others has resolved to meet

that force directly to expunge it from existence.

If there is a man more globally admired, let him

smile that warily enigmatic acknowledgement

that opposing the dark, sinister force of fascism

cloaked in the veneer of sanctimonious right

over wrong is not of  his choice but an obvious

existential necessity for a targeted people to

meet a destiny imposed by a dark force seeking

its destruction, emulating the very fascists in

its bid for supremacy that it once had common

cause with until becoming itself the victim.