they juggle words, flash fiction, throat ties readied, prim and proper
dress-for-success spokespersons, little liberal arts colleges, fawning faculty
social justice component, maybe even Zinn’s PHUS Cliffnoted,
they go forth, populate boardrooms, situation rooms like lemmings
chasing dollar, aphrodisiac of power, some orb buried in DC,
rodents of Ivy League clamoring to the power coasts,
eastern lobby of Wall Street, K-Street,
west coast rats nest of Disney-coordinated action media
… and then this flick 1958 showing
stampeding gerbil-like animals
over a cliff, careening into Arctic waters
little lie turned metaphor for a nation
lies born into action plans, nothing like Uncle Walt’s eugenics,
garnering Oscar, White Wilderness, now Millennials uploading
crap, working for X-er sycophants boot-lickers to Boomers,
staging You Tube shots of magical thinking,
anything to shill a shill, advance poison
like lemmings over a cliff, new flaccidity of foisted felons
then Zinn’s people, following survival of the fittest reality TV,
but lemmings know better than to see
Technicolor life as reality,
no real biological records of jumpy creatures
stampeding over cliffs,
just a stage right-stage left manipulation
these Cold War flaks now grandmothers
of the new PR spinners, raised on screens, NPR,
apps, scrolling lies, instantaneous aggrandizement
Jon Stewart, hipster clips, the real
lemmings jumping over the digital cliff