The briefings feature bogus blowhard bunk
As bureaucrats belch banal broadcast swill
That illustrates the worthiness of junk
Repackaged and resold as time to kill
Lest any news inform the peasant folk
Of just whose sticky fingers tap the till
Or who has drained the egg of all its yolk
With due care taken not to question terms
Lest linkages arise which might evoke
An image of a chain of wiggling worms
That leaves the hapless sycophant impressed
By nothingness which emptiness affirms
Post-modern oxymorons coined and blessed
A jaded jargon Jabberwocky jest
Confucius said to rectify the names
Before the work of government could start
For if the language neither fills nor frames
We squander both the science and the art
In debt to dreary dogma dark and dank
Which doesn’t leave us looking very smart
Or left with any money in the bank
To finance wars that we refuse to fund
Posterity our failures will not thank
When left by us a future moribund
For he has all our few resources spent
On fevered fetid fantasies fecund
But still he drags his feet and won’t relent
Much less to ask forgiveness and repent
When those who see no clothing say they do
And understand, they swear, no thing they know
The emperor struts naked in full view
With courtiers aquiver in the glow
Reflected by his skin-tight birthday suit
They wax ecstatic at the fashion show
And swap clichés about low-hanging fruit
Their guru mantras fly both thick and fast
Which equally solicit and recruit
A resonating echo chamber blast
To deafen any chance that one might hear
A rude request from some iconoclast
The tiny question that they truly fear
Like, why does this swell crowd act so damn queer?
His history degree from Yale was made
Grandfathered out of crony legacy
To illustrate the nature of charade
A skull and bones fraternal piracy
That Harvard, too, would all too gladly stamp
As proof of numbskull numerology
That seeks new bullshit phrases to revamp
And render quantitative measures dead
Where “folks pay lots of taxes” oils the lamp
By which his fiscal policy is read
He dips again into the tax-cut well
Since Yale put nothing in his empty head
His Harvard sheepskin, too, he tried to sell
As evidence that he could manage well
Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006-2010