Calmly appearing out of the gathering storm,
Mephistopheles is relaxed, self-assured.
His camouflaged disciples preach vagaries to the masses
until they are no longer aghast at his lurid manifesto.
Cheap new tires on this old bus of broken beliefs
make it acceptable to midgets of all sizes,
easily convinced or coerced into boarding.
Cobwebs in the rafters of this basement of life,
sticky filaments of lies trap small truths and consume them.
Attracted by the thin soup of what passes for news,
used to be pertinent until it wasn’t.
Of pretend knights seeking a plastic chalice,
interviewing the proprietors of all the last chance Texacos
who officially don’t know now what they didn’t know then.
Offering fake chrome apologies, premature and too late,
to whiners and the so easily offended.
Ignore the pollution so anathema to survival
and the almost unrecognizable skeleton of freedom discarded
at the intersection of greed and counterfeit righteousness,
where honor ricochets off of scheming and betrayal,
with sincerity left huddling in the corner of false hope.
This should be a siren song, is instead a feeble crescendo
in a man made pit where the chaos pendulum inches closer.
Its mechanism lubricated by the willful blindness of the dwarves,
its momentum enhanced by the sheepish acceptance
of lies manufactured to disarm the citizenry,
and promises of a utopia only fantasy can provide
and the cataclysm so richly deserved is insistently knocking.