Author's note: I once read that politics and poetry aren't meant to mix, but it's tough to write a personal poem of any substance when 85% of your time is spent on the couch. Anyhow, e2 has enough opinionated folks that I'm sure somebody will delete this if it's bullshit, and I promise I won't whine if that winds up being the case. All I ask is that you read it twice before voting.
Weighing in
A year later, and still the answers that have been dragged from our rubble are limp, bleeding, and unsatisfactory.
Our priest-king makes holy sounds, dancing futile figure eights around the corpses, refusing to let us roll the stone back in front of the ruined cave.
A rabble in the back softly whispers, "What the fuck are we doing?"
But is quickly and furtively shushed as everyone admires the baby emperor's new clothes.
He used to be a vicious little caterpillar, gutting the fibrous stalks of all-too-willing ancient plants, but since that day on the stage
(the speechifyin' cyborg had already lost the mob's attention, so the nascent priest-king's brother knelt behind him in order to provide a fulcrum for a rude shove)
he's been careful to keep the elastic on his mask tucked firmly over his ears.
A droning hum, as of distant motors in the sky, fills our heads with images of sugarplums.
"Where is the wolf?
Did it already get in?
Lock the pantry!"
The bugle sounds a call to a wolf-hunt, imaginary and buzzing, but nonetheless captivating.
Questions
(will we persist?
is this the end of the man of steel?)
dispelled by Lois Lane's shouts of terror, Jimmy Olsen's clever shutterbugerry.
Now we're all up on the screen, writing tomorrow's history books with hamburger grease and coffee, being all we can be.
Don't pause
don't consider
just run and Annie get your gun.
The priest-king rides at the head of the column, buoyed by its relative density, bothering little with finery.
His speech:
"In a remote basement, tucked away in the world's asshole, desperate men with bloodshot eyes tug impatiently at their sinful robes. Their dank room smells of blood, battles, and gunpowder, and these delusional men--for delusional is the only word--plan ways to spread their stink across all the world's nostrils. We must, therefore, spray them with our scents: lilac, vanilla, Obsession. Only once they run away screaming hysterically, their hands clutching the hair over their ears like the ineffectual slasher movie victim, can the planet smell correct once more. Did I mention the drugs?"
Jittering, we stood inert for too long.
Scraping pauses filled our lungs and we moved in a thousand equal and opposite directions at once, colliding internally and ultimately equalling zero net force.
What an ugly direction for our sums to have changed to. | 
