Conundrums

Poesy plus Polemics

“Conundrum”
Painting by Barbara Stroer
From barbarastroer.com

in the swamp
lives leviathan
nostrils alert
for the scent
of men’s lies
jaws engaged
set to snap
the black bones
of deception
and here does he
thrive never once
going hungry

in this fetid
arena where
speeches are
riddles and
trust the frail
province of fools
are great ethical
quandaries civic
conundrums
enough to try
sanity shatter
the mind of an
optimist citizen

no one to pick
up the shards
but the duped
who’ve been led
to embrace the
conceit that the
broken man’s
pieces result
from what surely
must be his mean
sinister judgments
and not from
enlightened
conviction

this dangerous
dark oily place
cannot ever let
truth find escape
it must die here
on tongues of
impostors whose
campaigns contain
empty rhetoric
only to govern as
solipsist rogues
rooted deep in
the slime of all
dead and decayed
noble purpose

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