Language is rhetoric’s thoughtful muse:

A player of tricks, a partaker of views

Hydra-like, yet headless; for she is artisan

Of politics flavored, every pleasure partisan,

That can be filtered through her noose.

 

All who stumble in her wake are caught,

Wrapped in rhythms, bundled, for naught

Left wading in the dark, questing meaning

Where none is found within the keening –

An artful sentence, fluttering, hides no truth –

It is not there – only the susurrations of ruth

And moral envy, tipping their hat at tongues

Not loathe to waggle, or expending the lungs

Towards spreading the news – victims galore

To paradox and epiphany’s incestuous amore.

 

And all the while the masses cheer, celebrating

Duckspeak and parrot-talk – double meaning

In entendres, enigmas in ciphers, all a mystery

With references, and a careless wave at history.

But we are dumb, lain so low: a slew of words

Would knock us quivering, like forest birds

Startled easily, at gunshot or cannon-fire

Rifling through the trees, aimed at neither

Beast or tree – something fleeting, fleeing,

Rustles past, too quick for human seeing.

They call it reason, an endangered freedom

Caged in parks, oases in deserts, a fiefdom,

Now paraded through streets, we forgetting

They are its poachers, its enemies, unrelenting,

Abhorrent of logic and axiom sensible, or

Methods of rigor, scientific sounding, nor

Averse to little lies, every now and then,

Till madness becomes sanity, and the pen

Of sheep, frothing rabid, comes unbuckled;

And Troy is buried; New York is toppled,

And we regret tomorrow, for all the sin

Of rhetoric’s vices, times that were thin

Now thick with starving – fallen for the noose

Of rhetoric’s cunning, thoughtful muse.