The Misfortune Teller ("Oceania in 2023")

With apologies to the shade of Percy Bysshe Shelley and his non-traditional sonnet:

"England in 1819"

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A people starved and stabbed in th' untilled field;
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

The Secretive Collective Oligarchy
anointed by our courts as Power, Inc.,
produces Narrative, puerile and snarky,
intended for us proles to eat and drink
then swallow without tasting pure malarky.
Our role in life: to buy but not to think.
In charge, a schizophrenic and psychotic
cabal of cretins slithering through slime:
a “leadership” decrepit and sclerotic
long past whatever one could call their “prime,”
addicted to War’s treacherous narcotic,
resulting in a “government” despotic:
Assange in Belmarsh prison for no crime
The “Law” a mealy-mouth-noise pantomime.