Inventing the Enemy

1

When the grand imagined menace
has run the course of its phantom presence
                     and vanished into history's mist

and the enemy we were sold
              and told we had in common
                            has officially ceased to exist

what villain  will we timid  servile fingers find
              to bind us as tightly together
              as when clenched we formed a fist?


What bogeyman will our handlers breed
to keep us in line as we've always been kept
       by feeding   our cynically nurtured need

       to feel that instinctively felt
       at-the-margins-of-reason cohesion
                            induced by communal fear?

What far-fetched  'existential' threat
will they next invent  to re-cement the bonds
                            we held and hold so dear

       when the mists of history have swallowed
              the most recent on the list of big lies
              whose cues we so willingly followed?


2

When the latest adroitly exploited
       outrageous made-up menace
              having served its sinister purpose

is commanded
       from behind the blinding curtain
              to abandon its phantom presence


       you may or may not have noticed
              but another  every bit as bogus
                     is either currently being cast

              or has already been unleashed
                     upon this greatest stage of all
                                   to supersede the last.


3

And should you  as one who sees through
all these hoaxes notice  the currency of control
       that is fear   beginning to lose its hold
              as its anemic grip on some of us slips

and you think that all that loss and slippage
might signal  our emancipation's imminence
                     you'd do well to remember this:


if more and more of us   flatly refuse
to fall for each less and less camouflaged ruse
that too coincides   with our overlords' plans

as we play like consummate rubes
              into their ever-conniving
                            divide-and-ruling hands

       as all possible opposition
       is effectively split into skeptics and dupes;

       is reduced  to a masterfully fractured mix
                            of fanatically factional troops.

This article was posted on Sunday, July 18th, 2021 at 8:03am and is filed under Poetry.