PROMETHEAN ANTAGONIST

(I don't usually post poems here -- kind of cheesy -- but this one expresses my view well. For what it's worth, only a tiny fraction of poetry I've written relates to politics).

I passed a wealthy man on my left and a poor one on my right and realized that neither of them was of harm or help to me.

I passed a country club of leisure success stories and later a shanty town of broken sidewalks and destitution and realized that I had created neither (except within the fantasies of mock rebels who would blame the very weather on innocent bystanders).

I and my kind were accused of both crimes and lapses in morality for failing to obey the edicts of imposed guilt – but were later found guiltier still...for not feeling guilty (by those with less innocence than my own).

The world spun out its charms…and its fouler images, never reaching equilibrium ("equality") or the satisfaction that imposed order affords planners with mundane gripes against the hands that feed them.

The world remained quite normal and I collaborated with its non-existent scheme to side with no one while some well-paid philosopher kings demanded I hang my head in shame so they could pretend to occupy a moral throne above and beyond the simple things that have always been.