He looks at you with bright, friendly eyes
A smile like sunshine.
“You can trust me. I’m on your side.”
And on the inside
He pictures you
Bound to a chair with electrical cord, naked, panting and haggard
Driven beyond your senses
With pain
While he gives you that warm, shy smile
Open, relaxed, so very sane.
“Really, I’m just like you.”
It must be true, for there is not a glimpse of human guile,
No tick, no twitch, neither blush nor flinch
No tell-tale smell
Of the timeless raging hell
That seethes beneath his perfect mask.
He tells a harmless little joke,
Baits his little trap
And you laugh
And you like him
He’s so confident and charming
He grins
His invisible hooks sink in
Like digger-wasp venom.
You’re just another human being
An emotional machine.
“I like you. You’re special.”
He is incapable of seeing what it is to be a human, being
And since you’re capable of believing
That when he looks sad he’s really grieving
That when the muscles in his face move
There must be some motivating feeling
You cannot see what hides beneath:
A cunning and carnivorous beast
An onion skin
If you peel back one layer
You’ll weep
Only to find another new and wet, shining within
With nothing at the centre
But a hole
Of hunger.
He is Cain
Who knows no god but his brother’s blood and pain
He is Nero
Held up before you as an artist, a statesman and a hero
He is Ghengis Khan
Unleashing in the souls of men the golden hordes of Hell’s demented spawn
He is the Pope
Wringing numberless atrocities from your boundless naive hope
He is at the top of every church and corporation
Running for every office for every party of every nation
His empty smiling face on every television station
The fractured paralogic of his words
Swirls about your sense of truth paralyzing your world
A cloud of ink obscuring his always-broken word
His name is Legion
He is your dear and fearless leader
You are his beast of burden
His food and his breeder.
“The rich are not like you and I.”
“Yes. They have more money.”
“No. It’s something different....”
Ah, but to Great Men the same rules do not apply.
We’d be mad, but they’re just funny
We’d be cold, but they're just distant.
Such great minds may be erratic
And in private often dramatic
But they will reward loyalty: just ask Hemingway
Whose quip turned our attention away
Who was given women, wine, the freedom to play
And ate a shotgun shell for lunch one day.
And just look at poor Ezra Pound
Tried as a traitor and imprisoned as a madman for daring to share what he’d found
For refusing to let the Good War go its evil way without making a sound
He called down their wrath
For he unmasked the true government of mankind
The secret order of the psychopath.
