Freedom to Vote for the Vapid and Vicious
(in the English "Alexandrine" verse style)

The Vitally Important Being: Who we Are,
Exists, because it must (if wishing on a star).
For if we looked like someone else, who would that Be?
“Identity” without the pronouns “he” and “she”?
Mouth noises from a larynx passing by the brain
out past the lips and tongue and teeth: a tired refrain
announcing that I Was, and Am, and will Become
(whatever, something) while embarrassed brains grow numb.

Someone will come before you now to say some stuff
about a thing or two or three, but not enough
to leave you more informed than when you first gave thought
to ask if what we do is what we truly ought.
We say, “We took him out” (which means we murdered him.)
We “went in” (we invaded merely on a whim.)
We claim, “to spread Democracy by coup makes sense.”
So can we with these tiresome ‘questions’ now dispense?

“An insult to intelligence.” Whose? Ours or Theirs?
If ours, who thinks that anyone in power cares?
Our unintelligent electorates, they know,
view our elections as a television show,
more boring than insulting. The United States
(whose voters see themselves as captains of their fates)
behave, in fact, like bovine herds content and tame.
Just tell them what you’d like and they’ll repeat the same.

So now a man with yellow “hair” and orange face
has told a half-black woman all about her race,
while both competitors for power claim they’ll bomb
whatever lives while saying they’ve created “calm.”
A graveyard they’d call “Peace” except they never use
that filthy word when killing they wish to excuse.
The blowhard belching bombast preaches to his cult,
while Kamelot tries hard (and fails) to sound adult.

Pascal, in Sixteen-Fifty-Five, found it absurd
that anyone attempting to define a word
like “being” would, as well, need “is,” the word defined,
in its own definition.* Arguments refined
as that about this magic word would clarify
if only they did not stupidity defy.
For what things are or when they were Bill Clinton knew
but couldn’t say and so he got the legal screw.

*Note: Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus, p. 9