The Well Meaning

We had other things we shared:
a conspiratorial eye;
the fantasised axioms of unassailable certainty.

The world’s an easy place to change,
when fettered only by caution,
embalmed in an all too comfortable sufficiency.

So we took no prisoners;
slaughtered the guileless shibboleths of the acquiescent,
left our boot prints in the black blood of disembowelled hope.

A better future?

Perhaps we once believed it might be so.

Staking the family silver on a plethora of book-learned arrogance
we laced our statutory instruments with the hemlock of well-intentioned ignorance.

And while we mistook hysteria for fervent followership
the wind whipped up the death rattles of a hundred thousand might-have-beens.  

Michael Forester

Somerset
October 2012

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