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.