Republeo and Demjuliet (Prologue)

William Sheepsheer hath undertaken a new play,

which will be performed by us from day to day.

Nowadays as we shelter, bumps on a Covid log, 

Cousin Will presents his play’s prologue:

Two polarities, both alike in indignity,

in fierce America, where we destroy our dream,

From political grudge erupteth Covid enmity,

Where pandemic vitriol renders sanitized hands unclean.

From forth the Covided  extremes of these two politicos

A host of vilifying fanatics whip up their rhetorical strife;

Thus do these locked-down, distanced foes

With their hostility destroy our national life.

The fearful spreading of this dread contagion

As the fierce infection of these factions’ rage, 

Which, made more lethal by our polarized ragin’

Is now the two months’ traffic of our national stage. 

And yet, if we with moderation could attend,

What the politicos do screw up—we shall strive to mend.

Our play will be acted by yon citizens in the land of the free;

It appears to be a tragedy, but needeth not to be.

To be or not to be—that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in our nation to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous politics,

Or to wear masks against a mist of Covid,

and by cooperating end it.

Glass Chimera

And that's the way it is . . .

The editor said if it bleeds,

it leads . . .

talkin’ bout them newsworthy stories

when journalists  were in their glory,

back in the day

before this present cranked-up fray.

Oh, but

that newsworthy rule was back in the former times,

when readers paid in nickels and dimes;

reporters had a pencil tucked o’er their ear,

and readers held our heritage dear.

Nowadays, if it provokes,

it’ll stoke

the facebook fire

and whip up tweeter ire,

as our frantically repulsing extremities

drum up crank polarities.

I hate to break it to ya

but here’s our newsworthy brouhaha:

The user who insults

gets results.

Read ‘em and weep

I said;

watch a talking video creep

instead.

Now fake news and hyped-up spin

constitute our gravest social media sin.

Meanwhile . . .

and I do mean mean,

Journalism gets lowered to the grave,

final resting place of the brave.

In this land of the free,

internet froth is mainly

what we see . . .

in this republic, if we can keep it,

'though as we sow

we'll surely reap it.

And that’s the way it is

in  21st-century democracy shobiz. . .

(as Cronkite might have said

if Uncle Walter were not dead.)

Glass half-Full

The Second Dumming

with apology to W.B. Yeats

Spinning, spinning on internet spires
the demagogues have lost sight of our foundation;
Polls spread apart; the moderates cannot hold;
Seared extremities are loosed upon the land,
The opiate tide is loosed, and everywhere
our old consensus urge gets lost in the noise
The worst gain all attention, while the best
Are mired in mediocrity.

Um, um, some revolution is at hand,
like, like . . . absurdity rules the land.
It’s ridiculous! Immediately as the tweets is tweeted
with some viral bizarrity from lala land,
it occludes our sight: somewhere in the pixels of the dream
a shape with venus body and head of man,
gazing blank and shiftless as The Cloud demands,
is moving its slow members, while all around
retweet droppings splatter from our looney clowns.
The narco takes the cake; so now we reep
as two centuries of freedom deep
spin downward now to chaos bleep by bleep.
So what rough beast, its hour come at last,
slouches toward America to delete our past?

King of Soul