A Cornucopia of Existential Threats
(in the English "Alexandrine" verse style)

[The Chorus walks on stage] Welcome dear audience.
So glad that you could come. You’ve shown uncommon sense
in choosing to suspend your native disbelief
in favor of credulity, however brief,
so that our tale your fancy can, at once, beguile,
transporting you to other worlds in lavish style,
from whence, in time, we’ll bring you back to here and now
without you caring, in the least, precisely how.

The title of our play: ‘An Existential Threat’
(or, in the common tongue: ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’)
seeks, first, to inculcate in you a lurid fear
of something inarticulate but strangely near
so much so that a mere mouth noise can freeze your mind
and leave you lost among the others of your kind:
consumers who will buy whatever lies can sell,
with all your good intentions leading straight to Hell.

Consider, please, the threat that our elections pose:
the voter told to validate what no one knows.
An existential threat to existentialists.
‘to be or not to be,’ a Hamlet that persists
in seeing everything as Jean Paul Sartre would do
as Being or as Nothingness, a choice of two
exclusive possibilities from which to choose
and having chosen either, one can only lose.

[Try picturing the White House Press Room podium,
with Kay Jay Pee, the minion mouthpiece, playing dumb.]
“An existential threat exists! We know He lives!
His dreadful presence only ignorance forgives.
Our country’s darkest hour, January Six,
He caused: a crime that nothing in the world can fix.”
[‘Exaggeration’ can’t begin to tell the tale
of how far this B S has gone beyond the Pale.]

A question from the Faux Noise guy provokes a sigh. . .
[Kay Jay-Pee]: “How can such as you ask such as I
to please refrain from calling Your Ex-Prez a threat?
I mean, how impudent can you reporters get?
To phrase a statement as an interrogative
expecting that what you imply will long outlive
the knowledge that your man is far from innocent,
and who, from doing Satan’s work, will not relent.”

“Since you object to ‘threat’ (the word we’d like to use)
why not ‘the Sixth of January’? (Need more clues?)
As you should know who deal with briefings like this one
we lie from when we start until we’re good and done
abusing other candidates, disclaiming such
a purpose, feigning innocence a bit too much.
So if the crude word ‘threat’ is one you can't accept,
try ‘Butler Incident’ (when Secret Service slept).”

An Existential Threat to threat-filled rhetoric
(or any mouth-noise from a face-hole, take your pick)
When governments swear that their words mean life or death,
the people can at once suspect abuse of breath,
from those who feel the need to stack superlatives
in order to make adverbs from their adjectives
then phrases, clauses, sentences and more to test
the limits of hyperbole: good, better, best.

An “existential threat” means that you won’t survive
if that which threatens you is not defeated. Strive,
therefore, to see that IT dies first. Get good and mad.
Although, if no real threat exists then you’ve been had,
manipulated by those frauds who get the gist
of rhetoric whose purpose you would not have missed
if you knew what they meant and not just what they said:
that what you feared existed only in your head.