Satires & Remonstrations

351 words

The Opening

A round of foolish crowding where
Some fools conflate to praise the worst,
And pretense forms an iron square
From which you dare not be the first
To step aside from what this crowd
Of curators has deemed the best
Or speak your thoughts a bit too loud,
Then place them counter to the rest.

Just have another glass of wine
While someone else curates the dip
And all pronounce some scrawl divine
That’s deep as a potato chip.
You’ll sense that truth and joy are spent
And absent at this art event.
Color Play

A dramatist in tedium,
Her colors languish, tropical.
In colors eggplant, peach and plum
Deep blue, off-shade, and sensual.

Subdued is the Victorian rose
Whose neutrals make her fade away
She wants pale colors, luscious glows
To make her faint persona stay.

All tints and tones intensify
Each individual, in turn,
Though tropical may shriek to see
That scarlet makes her psyche burn.
The Genetically Engineered Potato

So now they’ve messed with the potato
The better to fry up the thing
In dreams I see a blue tomato
Advance on me. Must everything
Be screwed around? The government,
Religion, education, money
Are engineered. It seems they’re bent
On chaos. Bees gave up on honey,

And soon there will be nothing left
That we may eat, breathe in or wear
And we’ll be crushed beneath the heft
Of know-it-alls. I know somewhere
Someday some fool will get a grant
To put a bonnet on an ant!
Newspeak

Computers spread illiteracy
Then place the blame on you and me.
One out of three are sure to die
From lack of adjectives, or sly
Misuse of nouns, which cast a pall
Upon apostrophes, which fall
Like icy raindrops, while misspelling
Infects verbs. There is no telling
The extent of the distress.
Our speech is truncated, a mess
And morphing fast, yet here we are —
Dull primates on a burnt-out star –
Gaily we text and tweet, and twitter
Such stuff as would make Shakespeare bitter.