Not Poetry. Quatrain Verse in English & Swedish. Dagsverser. On the Mundane & the Arcane.
When we prattle & gush
our words get overweening
like wild waterfalls rush
washes away most meaning
When we’re letting fly
with sentences mangled
it shall go awry
til communing strangled
Words which rapidly multiply
won’t explain, cannot clarify
“Am dying to be slim”, the rat had told them. Life Itself listened in.
A rat rotund felt bereft
been bemoaning his plight
of being fat. Didn’t look left
skipped as well looking right
He stepped into traffic
met a fate most dire:
En end grisly graphic
crushed by a truck’s tire
When found at daybreak
he had been flattened slim
While friends in heartbreak
sort of happy for him
Be careful how you use hyperbole
it may just turn into reality!
Let’s try stay on subject
be it with a meek ho-hum
before we just defect
wandering off in humdrum
Like some clueless critter
swept up in the fray
helpless, lost in flitter
can’t suppress our bray
Do we indulge in what is distracting
as we’re finding most else too exacting?
Mass media propagandistic
in a nation feudalistic
exaggerates threats terroristic
make us serfs cheer jingoistic
While deeply stirred by populism
we’re held back by cynicism
mightily fearing socialism
truly preferring tourism
When sacking solidarity
we live in barbarity
in punishing polarity
dispatched to disparity
Our cheers ring out chauvinistic
that’s amongst us nativistic
Must not spout in staccato
if we truly converse
but to flow like calypso
never try to coerce
Has ‘dialog’ by now gotten so corrupted
that we just compete to speak uninterrupted?
What passes for discourse
in today’s society:
Reverberation coarse
in purloined propriety
Wear our feelings on the sleeve
we do not know subtle
not known to hold back on peeve
brusque in our rebuttal
But even when helpful & kind to confront
must still know not to take personal affront
Images careening off keel
out-of-breath pitches twisted
in frenzied & frantic appeal
Any restraint resisted
Our attention usurped, wrested
in hugely bumped up gumption
Their vapid claims unattested
brought on in slick presumption
These ads of billions of dollars
bring neither rhyme or reason
just keep pouncing in crisp colors
Dance or consumer treason!
When speech & image
vile, while opaque
still pounce & scrimmage:
Time to awake!
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” – H.L. Mencken
If Mencken is right then democracy has by now been perfected in the U.S., thus:
Screen-augmented monomania
White House megalomania
Crass corporate kleptomania
Pervasive mythomania
Narratives declarative
the abnormal dressed up formal
while outright imperative:
Such is the glassy ‘new normal’
Swallowed in mindless frivolity
amidst decaying life quality
Such snide, pied words
by hunched techies riled
Their screen-filled worlds
by jargon jaunt wiled:
Nattering net nerds
in their self-fenced herds
Once we begin to label
people, situations
they’ll turn simplistic fable
drawing allegations
An opinion in a blink
demands our chiding or sainting
without bothering to think
could prove indelibly tainting
‘Evil’ found irreversible
seen as beyond redemption
while ‘Good’ always traversable
fragrant without exemption
But at times don’t ‘good’ people seem buffoonish
while ‘evil’ people benignly cartoonish?